Batgirl & Robin: Strategy Sessions
by Lorendiac
Summary: What really happened between Cassandra and Tim, one year after Infinite Crisis? The official version is full of holes, so there must have been something else going on, right? TimCass. Chapter 7 up: At last, a frank talk about their feelings!
1. Come, Let Us Scheme Together

**Author's Note:** Friday evening I bought the "Robin: Wanted" TPB. Yes, that's the one reprinting the "One Year Later" issues of Tim's old Robin title; the issues in which he learned that Cassandra Cain had gone very bad during the year that Bruce and Dick and Tim spent away from Gotham after they had survived "Infinite Crisis." The details of the plot were _just as lame_ as I had heard from online reviews I had seen over the last few years—which is why I didn't buy that material sooner. But once I did buy it and read it, I found myself facing the question: "Do I laugh or do I cry?" I chose to laugh! If you have also read that material, this parody will probably make more sense!

For the purposes of this parody's plot, I assume that almost everything published in the six-year run of Cassandra's old "Batgirl" title still happened. But I make no guarantees about respecting anything that's been published about her since then! It makes no sense to think it all happened _exactly_ the way it's been portrayed in the comics . . . therefore, I say, something else entirely was going on "behind the scenes!" Here's where we find out what!

* * *

**Batgirl & Robin: Strategy Sessions**

**Chapter One: Come, Let Us Scheme Together  
**

It was an ordinary apartment in one of the "quieter neighborhoods" of Gotham. It had an ordinary assortment of furniture and electronic gizmos and other paraphernalia of modern life. And in it sat a lithe girl with Far Eastern features who was not "ordinary" by any stretch of the imagination, but who had spent much of the past year working toward the educational attainments of an "ordinary" member of her age group. She could now read a typical newspaper story without sounding out all the words as she went along, for instance.

She was expecting a friend to arrive soon, and had spent an unusual amount of time (at least, for her) trying to decide how to dress for the occasion. Nothing too fancy—not a cocktail dress or elaborate gown—but nothing too grungy, either. She had read somewhere that many guys thought girls' bare feet were sexy, so she decided it wouldn't hurt to try that approach. On the other hand, being too obvious wouldn't go over well. After all, he was coming here to talk about serious business; not just to socialize.

Another member of their little group was showing serious signs of mental illness, but it was a foregone conclusion that the guy would kick and scream if anyone tried to dump him on the couch of a headshrinker. Besides, he was smart enough to run rings about most of the psychiatrists and clinical psychologists in the business, so badgering him onto that couch—even if possible—would accomplish precious little if his heart wasn't in it.

Anyway, she had settled for a Bugs Bunny T-shirt—not small enough to be tight on her frame; not really flaunting anything—and a pair of jeans. Ideally, her guest would just think she looked "cute" without assuming she was working hard to have a certain effect.

She had expected the doorbell to ring at the agreed-upon time for the meeting, but it was well after sunset and so she should have anticipated that he might arrive in his working clothes. When there was a tapping behind her on the balcony door, she glanced through the window, then opened the door and grinned at the clean-cut young man standing in front of her in his newest costume. "Hi, Robin. It's really good to see you again."

"Hi, Cassie! I feel the same."

She stepped aside to let him enter. After she had closed the door, Tim added: "And I see your sentences have gotten longer!"

From most boys to most girls, that line would have been either a weak joke or just plain snide. But Cassandra definitely wasn't most girls. Of course he remembered how _terse_ she had always been in the old days—and unlike most people, she could _see_ at a glance the difference between a boy who was really trying to be nice and a boy who was subtly mocking you. Tim's comment on her syntax was meant as a good-natured _compliment _in recognition of how she'd been improving herself in the year since they last met, so she accepted it as such.

"Yes, and next week I take the exam for my G.E.D. Barbara thinks I'll get it on the first try."

"Great!" he said immediately. "That'll put you _ahead_ of me—while you were hitting the books, I've been traveling around the world, and getting a high school diploma is still lurking somewhere in my future!"

"Which brings us to what I really wanted to talk about," she said. "Not diplomas—your long trip with Bruce and Dick. Any changes in the situation?" She settled gracefully onto a couch as she expressed the question.

"None," Tim said regretfully. "And I'm worried about it. You weren't around at the time, but I told Babs how it went a year ago, right after that big Crisis. Bruce finally gathered together Dick and I and said that he was going to force himself to step back and take a long vacation before he got _completely_ burned out by all the death and destruction we'd been seeing lately. Steph . . . my dad . . . Kon . . . Blüdhaven . . ."

There was a long pause while they both remembered the departed. Then Tim shook his head and resumed. "It turned out Bruce had already had a long talk with Harvey Dent about taking over as Gotham's primary guardian, above and beyond what regular cops were capable of doing. That surprised me, but I could live with it. Then Bruce said he wanted both of us—Dick and me—to tag along. Babs, he said, had plans of her own for her network of agents. But he felt that Gotham had struggled along for years without any Batman or Robin or Nightwing, and it could do so for another year if it was worth anything in the first place. In the long run, we'd be do more good for Gotham—or any other towns we wanted to call home in the future—if we took a nice long break. Like infantry units being rotated away from the front lines for awhile, before the constant stress makes too many of the soldiers crack up.

"I kept _waiting_ for him to mention Batgirl, though. Were you going to hang out with Babs as a 'Bird of Prey' full-time from then on, or had you already signed up with some other team, like the Titans, or had he _already_ invited you to travel around the world as part of a family trip and you just weren't interested in taking that much time off . . . or what? I even wondered if something terrible had happened to you during the Crisis and Bruce was _assuming_ I already knew about it!

"Anyway, Bruce kept _not mentioning you_ as he talked and talked about his plans for a massive change of pace for our little 'family.' So I finally took the bull by the horns and said, 'Bruce, what about Cassandra?'

"I'll never forget how _blank_ he looked. 'Who? You mean your friend Wonder Girl?'

"Dick and I traded glances. Dick's expression said that since I probably knew you _better_, he'd let me carry the ball on this one. That was big of him," Tim added in an ironic footnote, and then moved back to the main narrative. "I _reminded_ Bruce that Cassandra Cain was Batgirl, a bona fide member of our little family of masked do-gooders! Cassie . . . he hadn't exactly forgotten you, but he still didn't seem to grasp my point about any responsibilities he should feel toward you! Didn't seem any more interested in keeping track of you than he was in any of the _hundreds of other_ superheroes who are active nowadays!"

(She had already heard this story a year ago, from Oracle, and had been hurt by it, but she had long since moved on to curiosity at what would make Batman act so wildly out of character. If Tim felt the need to talk about things she already knew, as males so often did, she was willing to let him keep going. Just having him here for a friendly chat was enough to make her feel pretty happy.)

"Well, you know how Babs and Dick and I all got together and talked it over before Bruce planned for . . . some of us . . . to embark on the first leg of a World Tour. We agreed that any attempt to shoot Bruce with tranquilizer darts and drag him off to a telepath for a mind-probe to find out why he didn't care about you anymore would be _counterproductive,_ in light of those recent disclosures about what some of his other 'friends' had done to him when he caught them rearranging the bad Doctor Light's mind way back in the day.

"After all, he was already _admitting_ he needed a nice long rest, and that was a great first step. Maybe he'd get this all sorted out on his own, over time, after he had gone a few months without chasing Joker or Scarecrow or any of the 'usual suspects.' That was what we told ourselves, anyway.

"But no dice. I swear—in the entire time we were gone, Bruce _never_ mentioned your name; _never_ showed the slightest curiosity about what had become of you! Of course Oracle was keeping Dick and me up to date on how you were working very hard to improve your education, and had put the whole Batgirl thing on the back burner for awhile, but Bruce didn't want to know! For a while there, I thought he was deliberately playing a subtle joke to see how we handled it, but I finally gave up on that one too. I'd refer to you every once in awhile, and see him just look bored, or baffled at why I was dragging old times with 'Cassandra' into the conversation.

"On every other subject, he seems as rational as he ever was, without any embarrassing gaps in his memory. Now that we're back, and he _still_ hasn't even asked Oracle to give him your current phone number, what do we do about it?"

Cassandra had given that a lot of thought in recent months. "If the 'force him to submit to telepathic examination' idea is still off the table, then I see two other methods. One is that I just walk up to the Manor. Ring the doorbell. Alfred shows me in. I ask Bruce why I haven't heard from him lately."

Tim nodded. "The simple, straightforward approach. Confront him with you and see what happens. I thought of that too. But the way he's been acting, I think he'll just shrug and wonder _why_ you ever thought he would _bother_ to call you. That would hurt your feelings and otherwise leave us right back where we started."

"Then the other possibility is to . . . escalate. Raise the stakes somehow. Shock him out of the mental rut you say he's in."

"Ah. What did you have in mind?"

"Suppose we tell him I've become exactly what Cain wanted to make me? Ready to assassinate anyone who gets in my way? Heck, even leading the League of Assassins? That might get Batman _angry_ enough to admit he actually cares what I'm doing!"

"But Nyssa Raatko is the 'new and improved Ra's al Ghul,' the head of the League, ever since she killed her own father to create the job vacancy. Bruce knows that if anyone does!"

"Then we might have to confuse the issue," Cassandra said patiently. "I wonder if she'd be willing to fake her own death and let me take the blame—or the credit—or whatever we should call it?"

"Maybe, but there's a simpler way," Tim said, warming to the idea. "We just persuade Oracle to _tell_ Bruce that Nyssa got blown up by a car bomb in Libya or some other place far away, where Bruce can't easily double-check. If Nyssa pops up in Gotham again, or does anything high-profile, we can just say that shucks, her loyal minions must have rushed her smoldering corpse to the friendly neighborhood Lazarus Pit!"

"Or we could tell him the truth by the time it became an issue," Cassandra pointed out. "If he finally breaks through whatever this _mental block_ is all about, we'll have to let him know that I'm doing fine and haven't killed anybody. The trick is to get him to admit he _cares_ first! Then we can straighten out the rest of it!"

"It's all starting to come together as a plan," Tim said. "At the very least—if Bruce doesn't react much to the news of your 'turning to the Dark Side of the Force' when his back was turned, then we'll have _solid proof _to persuade the other big-name superheroes, his old buddies from the JLA, that Drastic Intervention is required, no matter how bad some of them still feel about the whole mindwipe thing. So we set this up like a classic detective story—except that instead of trying to have all the clues point to one logical solution, we make some of the story so outrageous that Batman really ought to wake up and smell the coffee at some point and say, 'That doesn't make any sense! Cassandra would never do a thing like that! _I'm_ going to get to the bottom of this!'"

He got a faraway look in his eye. After a minute of respectful silence, Cassandra asked: "What's on your mind?"

"The detective story thing gave me a new idea," Tim said. A "good mystery novel has at least one corpse turn up, preferably sooner rather than later. Suppose we do it that way and arrange for Bruce to hear that a dead Asian girl was found in a Batgirl costume? That might rock him enough to overcome his current indifference toward the subject of Cassandra Cain. Even if doesn't, it might at least soften him up for the later 'shocking revelation' that you had actually killed someone else and then stuffed her in one of your costumes!"

Cassandra held up a hand. "But where do we get the corpse?"

Tim said, "A _real_ corpse? Oh. I see what you mean. This will be more convincing if the police actually talk about it on their radios, and the body ends up at the morgue, and so forth. Okay, I admit this will take some careful planning. I wonder if there's anyone in the Far East who would be willing to sell us a fresh corpse—we'd _make sure_ the poor kid hadn't been murdered by the seller—and then let us freeze it and ship it over here? No, forensics might figure out the body had been cooled to confuse the time of death. Do we beg someone with teleport tech to let us use it to bring the fresh corpse over here in the blink of an eye? Failing that, maybe we could find a really convincing _android_ somewhere . . . or beg Zatanna to cast a spell and create a _simulacrum_ of a recently deceased girl. . ." His voice trailed off as he mentally explored the possibilities.

Cassandra smiled. This was going well. Batman's mysterious indifference to her really was troubling, but the best part was she and Tim would now be spending hours together as they tried to figure out how to make a crack in it. She had her own agenda where Tim was concerned, but figured there was no point in telling him that just yet!

* * *

**To Be Continued:** The next chapter skips ahead. After feeding Bruce a cock-and-bull story about Cassandra's moral decay, Tim returns to her apartment to bring her up to speed on all the outrageous lies he told, and to describe how the Dark Knight reacted to them. (I've already written nearly all of that chapter, but will hold off for a few days before posting it.)


	2. We're Making Very Little Progress

**Author's Note:** As promised, it's been a few days and here I am again with the second chapter of this parody. This time around, Tim is basically summarizing the events from those "Robin OYL" issues in the TPB I mentioned before—the idea is that he's already fed that load of malarkey to Batman and now is reporting back to his fellow conspirator, Cassandra, on how it went. My version of Tim, unlike the "canonical" one, is keenly aware of _all_ the inherent absurdities in that alleged sequence of events! (Although my Batman, _just like_ the canonical one, is cheerfully clueless about the many holes in Tim's report! But at least I have figured out the reason for that, even if I won't tell you right away!)

* * *

**Chapter Two: We're Making Very Little Progress**

The doorbell rang.

Cassandra peered through the peephole. Tim. In plainclothes, this time.

He probably thought he was keeping a good poker face, and not letting his shoulders slump in despair or anything like that, but one look told her the general tone of his news.

But she didn't say so as she opened the door. One of the social skills she'd labored to master in the past year was _patience_. People usually wanted to tell you good news or bad news in their own way, at their own pace. Or they were hoping to conceal it entirely. In any event, they didn't like the idea that you might already know most of it just from watching the way their muscles twitched as they tried to find the right words.

They exchanged hello's.

The last time he'd visited, he'd stayed standing—pacing around the main room much of the time as he talked out his ideas. She had seen he needed that, so she hadn't argued. This time, though, she decided to steer him into a more relaxed position—so after closing the door behind him, she touched his arm gently and directed him toward an easy chair. "Sit down and relax. _Then_ tell me how it went."

"You're so solicitous," he murmured as he let himself be steered into position. "Am I _that_ obvious?"

Oops! Occasionally she forgot that other people weren't completely blind to the undertones of _her_ reactions—just _mostly_. Then someone would show a flash of insight which reminded her that she didn't actually have a monopoly on reading people's tells. "Not to everyone," she said tactfully as she settled onto a couch in a position where he could watch her without craning his neck.

"Okay, okay. In a nutshell—Bruce believed _every word_ of the crazy story I told him!"

Now Cassandra felt as transparent as glass—her mouth actually fell open! (She had expected Batman to believe, say, at least four lies out of every five, at first, but sooner or later he'd spot inconsistencies, wouldn't he?)

Tim grimaced. "I improvised on various details as I went along, and exaggerated some aspects beyond anything we'd discussed, but I still followed the main outline. I swear I did my best to get him to realize something Badly Wrong must be happening where you were concerned.

"I told him I'd dropped everything and left Budapest without letting him or Dick know where I was going—for the simple reason that I got a nasty anonymous note threatening to do terrible things to you if I didn't come alone to a rendezvous."

Cassandra gave Tim a level look.

"Yes, yes," Tim said impatiently, "at that point he should have read me the riot act about teamwork and letting people know where I was and so forth, not to mention the fundamental folly of letting the mysterious villain dictate _all_ the rules of the game from the get-go! He should have pointed out that if I had gotten myself killed in ambush, our friends wouldn't even have known where to start looking for the perps! But he didn't give me that lecture! I don't think it even occurred to him! I swear, it's like I just mention your name in a conversation and his IQ temporarily drops a hundred points! Now granted, he's got more IQ points to spare than most people, but the effect is still painfully noticeable!

"I swear I did my best to make him wake up, Cassie. I told him the body inside a Batgirl suit was Lynx—even though he should have remembered that Lynx has already been dead and buried since she got _decapitated_ during the big gang war that Steph accidentally triggered. I told him the cops were so dumb they didn't even have a doctor look at the body soon enough to figure out it had already been dead _for three hours_ before I arrived on the scene. I told him the CSIs were so dumb they didn't even notice a _visible-to-the-naked-eye_ fingerprint on a lens in 'Lynx's' mask; in fact, they might have accidentally blurred it! I told him that since 'Robin' was suddenly on the GCPD's most-wanted list, I decided the only sensible thing to do was invade a police station _while dressed as Robin_ so I could examine the corpse and its costume more closely!"

Cassandra favored Tim with her most skeptical look . . . sensing he _wanted_ to see that reaction . . . and he smiled wanly.

"I really thought that last bit was the straw that would break the camel's back, you know? Bruce taught me all about the fine art of disguise—he knows perfectly well that I had a zillion _other_ options besides waltzing into that station as Tim Drake or waltzing in as Robin! I kept hoping he'd say, 'Tim, you're not making any sense. Maybe you've been hypnotized.' He never did.

"So I moved on to the Lady Shiva bit." Tim looked embarrassed—even a normal girl could have seen it—and Cassandra realized he must have heard about the blood tie between Shiva and herself. From Oracle, probably. It must be awkward to try to tell a friend that you had invented a tall tale about her long-lost birth mother, the cold-blooded assassin. (She couldn't say from experience—she didn't know anyone else with that sort of mother.)

"Go on," she said calmly. "Oracle did her part?"

"Oh, yeah, Babs came through like a champ. Before I was reporting all this to Bruce, Babs had 'just casually mentioned' to him that she had accepted Lady Shiva as a pinch-hitter Bird of Prey, filling in while Black Canary was over in the Far East trying to relive some of Shiva's old experiences. Babs didn't mention that Shiva is already wanted in a zillion jurisdictions for the _murders_ she's pulled over the years, but she sure expected Bruce to 'remind her' of that little detail! Loudly and angrily, in fact!

"Only he didn't. My current theory is that since he gets stupid whenever you're mentioned, and Shiva is known to be your mother, he now gets stupid wherever she is concerned, too. Anyway, where was I?"

She played along. "After Barbara planted the idea that Shiva is our 'ally' now, you told Batman something else about Shiva?"

"Right, right. Shiva (in my fairy tale for Bruce) was the one who told me that Nyssa had died in a car bombing right around the time I was being framed for murder—and that it all fit together because some outsider was trying to stage a coup to take over the entire League of Assassins. Then I told Bruce that I found a piece of paper with a coded message inside the ersatz Batgirl mask. It was written in a Navajo-based code, I said. Then I 'reminded' him that over a year ago, before the big Crisis, he taught you and me how to read Navajo."

Cassandra blinked. "Why would he _try_ to teach me a different language . . . last year . . . when I was still having such a hard time with reading and speaking English?"

Tim shrugged. "He wouldn't. I was ready to say that it must have something to do with the same Cosmic Alterations which brought Jason Todd back from the dead around that time, so that now Bruce and I remembered history differently . . . but Bruce never even thought to ask the question.

"Anyway, I told him I sat down and did eleven hours' worth of geometrical calculations so I could do an acrobatic routine exactly right in order to get through 120 feet worth of criss-crossing ultraviolet beams in a sewer tunnel leading into Blackgate. The purpose of the exercise was to extract David Cain. He was supposed to be the other key ingredient in an 'exchange of hostages'—the father for the daughter. (Yeah, like simply giving in to extortion is exactly the way Bruce trains us to behave? As opposed to having someone else disguise himself as Cain and be ready to 'break out of his bonds' at a moment's notice?)

"Then I told Bruce that when I entered Cain's cell, the man was wide awake, on his feet, and saw me coming – but I was _still_ able to take him out with one flying kick before he could get his act together to block and counterattack!"

Cassandra giggled before she could stop herself. For an instant, she worried she might have hurt Tim's feelings—but he grinned back at her. "Ridiculous, right? It was _supposed _to be ridiculous. I barely managed to keep my face straight when I was telling Bruce, but he seemed to swallow it!"

Tim made gestures meant to indicate what he had (allegedly) done next. "I hog-tied Cain so he couldn't possibly hurt me after he eventually woke up. Then (I said) that after I had carried Cain out of the prison—which would be a _neat trick_ all by itself, if I'd been dumb enough to risk a hernia that way—I woke him up and started interrogating him. Working on the assumption that all this murder and extortion had been an elaborate scheme on his part to engineer a prison break."

She blinked. "Wait—if you had to do fancy jumping for a hundred and twenty feet, never putting a foot wrong, on your way _in_, didn't you also have to do the _same_ routine in reverse on your way _out_? What did you tell Bruce? That you were carrying Cain on your back while you were doing all that jumping and tumbling? He weighs a lot more than you do!"

Tim looked sheepish. "To tell you the truth—I didn't even think of _that one_ until I was in the middle of the story! By then it was too late to come up with a half-baked rationale—so I decided to just talk fast and keep going, since by then I was pretty sure Bruce was not in any fit condition to notice such a gaping hole in the plot of my story!

"Then, of course, I said that when a zillion members of the League of Assassins showed up at the exchange point, dressed like ninja, it turned out that you were the ringleader. You were wearing an outfit remarkably _similar_ to what Shiva was wearing when she dropped in me on the night before!"

Cassandra made a face. Tim said placatingly, "I know, I know—you never saw her as the perfect role model. Not even for fashion sense. But I had to describe something!

"Anyway, then I had you going into that big rant about how betrayed you felt when you just recently learned about Annalea—this (imaginary) rival protégée of Cain's. You were absolutely right about that one, Cassie—a year ago Bruce didn't pay any attention to Babs's status reports about you, so now he doesn't remember (if he ever really knew) that you've already known _for a year_ that you weren't the only poor kid Cain tried to turn into a body-language-reading killing machine.

"By the way, I ad-libbed a line from you about how you had turned the whole world against me just to show me there's no real justice unless we darn well make it happen the hard way without being bound by other people's arbitrary rules!"

She was having trouble with the logic. "The whole world? What about Batman and Alfred and Dick and Barbara and the Titans . . . and the billions of people who _don't really care_ what happens in Gotham—"

"Yeah, yeah, if we were being strictly logical and accurate about this, I should have claimed you said you had only turned _the Gotham cops_ against me . . . _for the time being_ . . . and mostly by _sheer luck_, since they supposedly were too stupid to find out when the corpse had actually died . . . but that sort of carefully qualified statement just doesn't have the same ring to it of 'traditional supervillain hyperbole,' you know?"

"Not really," she said patiently. "I didn't usually let them talk all that much before I hit them."

Tim waggled a finger at her. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, young lady, interrupting their big moments that way! Don't you realize some of them work on those Dramatic Monologues for weeks before the Real Performance?"

He was kidding and she knew it, so she just laughed for a few seconds before saying, "All right, go on describing my sins. What else did I do?"

Tim gazed off into space for a moment. "Lessee . . . um . . . right, we were just getting to the part where you tried to recruit me into the League. My initiation test would be to take a gun and kill your own father, David Cain, while he was bound and helpless. You remember that bit; you suggested it!"

"Did Bruce . . ." She let the words trail off.

"No, he didn't seem to realize that you should have known, from one glance at my body language, that there was no chance in he—" Tim broke off. "Er, no chance in _heck_ that I'd go ahead and kill anybody just to make the League of Assassins happy with me. Not even if the target was a convicted murderer. I tried to rub it in as hard as I could—I described you talking at length, as if you were sure you just had to find the right words to sway me, by trial and error."

"That almost makes sense," Cassandra said generously. "I can see people's attitudes constantly shifting as I talk or other people talk. If I went crazy, I suppose I'd still see that—but be more hopeful about my chances of gradually nudging you a little bit further, and a bit more, and so forth, until you 'went over the edge'?"

"Maybe. Anyway, I didn't shoot Cain. I fought my way through a bunch of your ninja guys, and then—I told Bruce—I even managed to land a few blows on _you_ during our subsequent fight, instead of you just scoring a knockout in the first round!"

(Cassandra didn't giggle this time, but it was a near thing. The only way Tim was likely to score on her in a one-on-one would be if they were fighting in pitch darkness so she _couldn't possibly_ see it coming . . .)

"Anyway, then it all ended with a huge explosion and I lost track of you. In theory, you could be dead. More probably, you crawled off into some dark cave to lick your wounds until you feel up to a rematch."

Cassandra glanced around her comfortable, well-lit apartment, several stories above ground level, and said deadpan, "Right. I can barely stand it in here, it's so damp and dark and crowded . . ."

Tim snorted. "You've been working on your irony, haven't you?"

"Yes," she said agreeably, and then stared at him. "Now tell me the rest of it."

"Huh?"

"Around the time you were summarizing my 'sins,' you hesitated . . . and skipped over something you decided I didn't really want to hear. Go back and fill it in!"

She watched him remembering how it was almost impossible to tell her a direct lie and get away with it. Then he seriously considered just refusing to answer. After all, he didn't really think she would beat it out of him. Then he began to realize she could find out anyway, if she asked enough leading questions and waited to see which ones touched on hot-button issues. (Like that game where one person is looking for something and the other keeps saying: _warmer, warmer . . . now it's colder, colder . . . _except it really wouldn't matter much if Tim stubbornly kept his _mouth _shut, as long as Cassandra could _see_ him!)

"It was dumb," he finally said. "I was trying to imagine it all in my mind's eye as I told Bruce, as if the story were a Hollywood blockbuster movie, and on the spur of the moment I threw in a really silly idea. It might offend you, and it is not likely to ever come up again."

"And if it does?"

Tim closed his eyes for a moment. "All right." He opened them again, but seemed to be trying to avoid her gaze as he said, "When I was talking about your recruiting speech, I hinted that you were . . . kinda . . . trying to put the moves on me . . . and talking about having a dream involving the two of us, together forever as partners . . . like there was some sort of creepy _Fatal Attraction_ thing going on in your head."

Cassandra froze. That one _wasn't_ so funny.

She had started feeling . . . interested . . . in Tim when they were working together in Blüdhaven for a bit. But at the time, he'd just _recently_ lost Spoiler _and_ another girl he knew at school and liked, and she knew darn well he was still grieving, with zero interest in trying to find another girlfriend so soon. Meanwhile, Cassandra had known she still had a _lot_ to learn before she'd have any business trying to latch on to a serious boyfriend. (Kissing Superboy a few times had been _fun_, but it wasn't going anywhere.) Besides, Tim hadn't shown much sign of being attracted to her—at that point he was still trying to get over the squeamish feelings which arose when he looked at her and thought about the whole "raised to be the perfect killer" thing.

Eventually she had figured out that Tim's skittish attitude was all tangled up with his painful memories of Jean Paul Valley, whom she'd hardly ever met, but who—she'd eventually learned—had been "destined" for the role of "carefully bred and conditioned assassin" from the day he was born. (Could she ever relate!)

Long before Cassandra came to Gotham, Bruce had offered Jean Paul the chance to fill in as "Batman" after Bane had broken Bruce's back. It had turned out Jean Paul hadn't been as "cured" of extensive subconscious conditioning as Bruce had hoped at the time, with the result that things had gotten awfully messy. Tim had been right there in the middle of it. Understandably, he had been _very worried_ about history repeating itself with Cassandra—but he'd obviously gotten over that since then. He no longer flinched around her, as if worried that she was likely to snap in the blink of an eye and start breaking his bones on a whim!

Anyway! When Bruce had announced his year-long vacation, taking Tim and Dick with him, Cassandra had thought it was a great idea. It would give her time to try to narrow the gap between Tim's education and hers, and it would give Tim more time to stop fretting about her odd childhood and pedigree. (She'd even known it was _possible_ that she would lose interest in Tim, as she got "older and wiser" in his absence, much as she had quickly lost interest in his buddy Kon-El. Hadn't happened this time around, though!)

She had waited this long without dropping any serious hints, but she wasn't planning to wait _forever_. Once they got this thing with Bruce straightened out . . .

Tim saw her stiffen, and misinterpreted the reasons. His cheeks began to color. After a few seconds in which she still hadn't said anything, he blurted out: "I'm sorry! Was that in bad taste? Over the line? If you want, I'll go back and tell Bruce that after thinking it over, I realized you were just flirting 'for practice,' or to mess with my head, and that it's a hundred-to-one odds that you aren't seriously interested. Or if that doesn't work for you, tell me what does!"

There was a fascinating double standard here.

Tim had been willing to go along with telling Bruce, as a joke or a test, that Cassandra was committing murder, framing Tim for murder, taking over an entire organization of murderers, using extortion and other dirty tricks to lure Tim into a trap, and then trying to persuade Tim to join her in doing more murders and such from now on—but it still embarrassed him to admit that he had also implied she might have so much as _hinted_ at a sexual interest in him. Apparently calling "a nice girl" a _murderer_ was far more excusable than calling her a _seductress_. That was a peculiar place to draw the line . . .

Meanwhile, though, poor Tim was nervously waiting to see if she'd slap his face over this. (As if!)

She smiled at him. "It's okay, Tim. Really, it is. You just _surprised_ me when you said that. But it didn't ruin anything. Stand up and let me hug you to show there's _no_ hard feelings." (It was as good an excuse as any!)

Tim's confused body language suggested he thought there was something shaky about that logic, but he didn't put up a fight as she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him. He had a nice, warm, solid feel to him . . .

"Still friends?" she asked pointedly.

"Still friends!" he assured her, and then took the hint and—_very gently_—reciprocated the hug, putting his arms lightly around her waist, not trying to squeeze at all, just self-consciously going through the motions of showing "friendly affection" and afraid to press his luck any further. She could tell the difference, all right, but it was still a step in the right direction!

"So," she said, without letting go of him, "what do we do about Bruce now?"

"_I'm_ giving up," he said frankly, and she could see it hurt him to say it. Made him feel like a failure, and yet relieved at the same time, at the thought of handing the problem over to someone else, and then ashamed of himself for feeling so relieved, and around and around it went! "Now we've _got to_ talk to Superman and some of the other 'big guns.' My friends in the Titans, too. If this is some sort of artificially imposed mental block, and I think it must be, then that's been done to other heroes before, and they've generally managed to pull through—with help from their friends. We need magicians and telepaths and that other spooky stuff that can play games with people's memories and emotions. Or if there's something physically planted in his head, we may need Cyborg to help figure out its programming so we don't do more harm than good. What Vic doesn't know about chips configured to interface with human brain tissue ain't worth knowing!"

"Well, let me know if there's anything I can do to help, Tim," she finally said, keeping her tone light, "and in the meantime, I think you can let go me of now."

"Oh!" He hastily did so, dropping his hands to his sides as he stepped back from her, still afraid he might have offended her somewhere along the line, even if she wasn't admitting it.

That wasn't surprising, but it wasn't the reaction she'd have preferred. Ideally, he would have noticed her careful phrasing meant she _wasn't_ ordering or even requesting him to let go right away. Then he would have said reasonably: _That's an interesting hypothetical point—I sure could. Do you _want_ me to?_ And then she would have said: _Heck, there's no big hurry as far _I'm_ concerned, if you're not getting bored,_ and then . . . well, that chain of events obviously wasn't going to happen right away. Too bad!

But she hadn't really _expected_ him to leap to the conclusion that one friendly hug, when they were both worried about Bruce, meant anything extravagant. She knew Tim was starting to be aware of some attraction to her, but he was far too much a gentleman to _assume_ it was mutual (and he couldn't see at a glance that it was!). Telling him flat out at this early stage didn't seem like proper flirtation technique, as near as she could tell from tips she had been perusing on the Internet lately. This was the sort of thing mothers were supposed to teach their daughters, but asking _Lady Shiva_ for advice on romance just didn't seem prudent . . . the idea triggered some interesting images, though . . .

"You're laughing again," Tim observed, keen detective that he was. "Something I did?"

"No." She shook her head quickly. "Sorry. A train of thought went off in a whole different direction. Never mind."

He visibly throttled his curiosity. "Been there, done that. Let's move on, shall we?"

* * *

**Author's Note:** For any of you who are wondering about my other (and already much longer) Cassandra Cain fanfic serial, I just want to assure you that I've been working on it as recently as last week. But even though I know _who_ the mystery villain is, _and_ what will happen in the next couple of chapters, _and_ how it ends, I'm still having some trouble getting the words to come out the way I want them to, for the right effect. Last Friday I finally decided to break down and buy that TPB I mentioned at the start of this story, and read it, and then I found myself typing out this parody for a change of pace.

(Incidentally: I never took the idea of a Tim/Cass romance in the DCU very seriously, although I had no screaming objections to it either, but I found using that concept could fit in remarkably well with my ideas for where this parody is going. Since I only started writing this silly thing a few days ago, those ideas definitely have been in flux as I went along, but I feel I now have a fairly good idea of what's wrong with Bruce and how it might be fixed. However, I don't know when "Chapter 3" will be forthcoming. For one thing, I still _haven't read_ the Teen Titans stories which revealed "Evil Cass" was actually "the drugged slave of Deathstroke through no fault of her own," or however it went. I've just heard about that revelation in general terms. Once I read that material, I'll have a better idea of whether or not I want to adapt the major plot points for a future installment of this parody!)


	3. She Thinks of Me as a Brother, Right?

**Author's Note:** The first two chapters were full of dialogue. This one, I'm afraid, is full of teenage introspection. I'm sorry! But I decided it was time to focus on Tim's viewpoint, so you can contrast how Cassandra feels about him with how he _thinks_ Cassandra feels about him. I need to start laying a foundation for later twists. (Several days ago I wrote out a scene in which those two finally start to get on the same page about their feelings. I modestly think it's pretty darn good. Unfortunately, the plot is _nowhere near_ far enough along for me to actually _use_ that scene right away! Check with me again in four or five chapters!)

As a sop to those who think the introspection is overdone, I threw in a Surprise Guest Star toward the end.

* * *

**Chapter Three: She Thinks of Me as a Brother, Right?**

Tim settled the receiver back onto the hook. Finding a payphone in this part of Gotham hadn't been nearly as easy as it would have been even three or four years ago, but he didn't dare use any phone line or cell that Bruce _knew_ was connected to Tim or anyone else in their circle of friends. Even when Oracle was on your side, ready to run interference to screen you from the Batcave's computers, you could never be quite sure what the World's Greatest Detective _might_ uncover about your long-distance calls!

Once they got Bruce's head screwed on straight, that sort of thing wouldn't matter. But right now Tim really didn't feel like trying to lie to Bruce all over again about what he was doing and why.

It only took Tim a minute to get to the roof of the closed-for-the-day office building he had designated as rendezvous point. That left at least nine more minutes before the guy he'd just spoken to was expected to arrive after tidying up some loose ends. Which meant 540 seconds of prime _brooding _time was now available.

Tim mopped his brow. It was time to come to terms with the fact that Cassie still made him nervous, but not for the same reasons as a couple of years ago! He had finally gotten used to her the way she was, and then she had to go and change again when his back was turned! And while the changes were good—better at expressing herself smoothly in full sentences; literacy problem finally licked; social graces improving; that sort of thing—the finished product came as a shock.

Although he really liked what she had done her hair.

_Okay, that seems safe enough. Let's start with the hair._

A year ago, Cassie's hair had been pretty short—well, for a girl's. Longer than Tim kept _his_, but still only coming down around the collar in back. She must have chosen to experiment by just letting it grow for the last twelve months; tonight twin ebony tresses had framed her face and fallen down in front of both shoulders.

Tim claimed no great understanding of the subtleties of how women selected new hairstyles, but it was his considered opinion that the longer hair, hanging down that way, made Cassie look even _cuter_ than he remembered from before!

Of course he hadn't said so. Cassie probably got far too many casual compliments from guys trying to hit on her whenever she walked around in plainclothes. That must grate on a girl's nerves after awhile. Even worse, he supposed, when the girl in question could just glance at a guy and know exactly what his _real_ motives were in saying whatever he had just said, even if it sounded like a harmless attempt to boost her ego.

Heck, lots of guys who _didn't_ speak to her must have stray thoughts flashing through their heads about that attractive Asian chick they passed on the sidewalk, never realizing that the emotional essence of their momentary fantasies was being received loud and clear on her end, even if the guys would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they had never _said_ or _done_ anything to harass her in any way!

(Tim glanced around the surrounding area, even though he knew it couldn't have been nine minutes yet. Then he went back to thinking about what it must be like to be the one and only Cassandra Cain.)

Most women didn't _constantly_ worry about what was going on in the heads of every strange man they passed on the street in broad daylight. But Cassie couldn't very well "tune out" the _knowledge_ of such things unless she wanted to walk around blindfolded all the time. What fun that constant flood of information must be for the poor kid. (Tim sure wouldn't want to know what _every_ female he met really thought of _his_ looks! It would probably crush his ego, for one thing.) Still, Cassie seemed to cope with it well enough. He just hoped that, since returning to Gotham, he wasn't adding to that burden . . . . well, not in any _big_ way. He was afraid that even if he did, she would be too polite to tell him how _irritating_ it was getting.

He didn't used to think about Cassie that way often enough to matter—not consciously, anyway. In the old days, he was far more likely to brood about how she'd literally been trained from the cradle to read people's body language and then smite them with weapons or bare hands. It made him edgy around her for a long time—something she must have known _all along_, on those occasions when they crossed paths in Gotham, but she rarely mentioned it.

By the time they worked together to investigate rumors of the late Blockbuster's return from the grave in Blüdhaven, and found it was actually the Penguin trying to take over the local rackets, Cassie had been eating a healthier diet for a long time, thanks to the guidance of Alfred and Babs, and so it wasn't terribly surprising that her figure had improved a bit since Tim first met her in the No Man's Land days.

(Okay, maybe _more_ than just a _bit_?)

That was something he had tried very hard _not_ to notice at the time they tangled with Penguin and his army of thugs. The poor kid had more than enough problems at that point—working on her reading skills, for instance—without wondering how she was supposed to react if her trusted friend Tim Drake suddenly said something incredibly stupid and provocative, such as: "You sure fill out that Batgirl costume a lot better than you did on the day Bruce gave it to you!"

He winced as he remembered something he had tried to suppress for a long time. He had _actually said_ something similar to Cassie, months _earlier_ than the time they teamed up in the 'Haven, on the night when she'd experimented with wearing one of Babs's old Batgirl costumes and then just happened to run into Tim (as Robin) out on the streets of Gotham.

Right before someone struck him from behind, derailing his chain of thought, he had been very surprised by the "new look" and had just begun to tell her she looked "very hot" in that outfit. She hadn't even _tried_ to reply to his banter! A few minutes later Tim could have bitten his tongue after he remembered just how far behind the curve Batgirl was in developing the language and social skills for interacting with other teenagers and their insensitive personal remarks. Cassie, at that time, probably didn't know _anything_ about "flirting" with a boy if she liked an unexpected comment about her appearance; nor how to tell a guy to please tone it down if she didn't like the comment at all, but wanted him to remain a friend. Ergo, the poor kid probably hadn't a clue how she was supposed to react to a spontaneous remark from Robin about how hot she looked in that tight gray costume. Which might have something to do with why she had never worn it _again_?

Although the "very hot" remark had at least been _sincere_! Painfully tactless—if he'd thought about it first, he wouldn't have said it—but still his honest opinion after that first glance at her new look. He certainly hadn't been trying to mock her or achieve any other nasty end. Maybe she'd given him brownie points for not _trying_ to make her feel uncomfortable, even if he had still managed to do so in spades?

After _belatedly_ thinking it through, Tim had realized it would be polite to stop making any admiring remarks about her appearance until she had a stronger grasp of how to banter with members of the opposite sex without letting it mean too much. Of course, since just keeping your lip zipped didn't mean much where Cassie's perceptions were concerned, he'd repeatedly told himself over the next few months to _think_ of Cassie as an "innocent little girl" who looked much older than she actually was. That was probably the best way to convince himself that she was automatically "off limits" to anyone but a pervert.

It seemed to have worked by the time they were in Blüdhaven. Besides, at that point he was reeling from the deaths of two other girls he'd known, which made it even less likely than before that he'd try any serious flirting with Cassie when he was still feeling shell-shocked.

But that attitude of "she's basically a little girl" didn't work any more when she spoke fluent conversational English, was about to be tested for her G.E.D., and was generally more confident in how she dealt with things other than fighting! If Cassie had noticed he was more consciously aware of her status as a "big girl" now, she hadn't bothered to register a complaint. Come to think of it, the way she had quickly forgiven him for that ridiculous ad-lib about Her Evil Version putting the moves on him, and then had given him a friendly hug to show there was no grudge, had obviously been her way of showing she wasn't going to start scolding him for any of his _stupid_ masculine reactions when they had already been friends for so long. He appreciated the reassurance.

The hug had felt _awfully_ nice, though. But then, they usually did. He had been hugged by enough girls to know that much.

_Just think of it as "sisterly affection,"_ Tim told himself firmly. _She's a sweet kid and she _trusts _you enough to let herself _relax_ around you. It's your job to be worthy of that. _

_Hmmm. Of course she also knows that she could turn you into chopped liver with one hand tied behind her back if you were crazy enough to start taking liberties, so maybe "trust" isn't so much the issue as "extreme self-confidence"? _

"Am I interrupting something?" asked a man's voice from above and behind him.

Tim spun around, although he already knew who it would be. The Man of Steel was standing on thin air, smiling reassuringly as he said, "You seemed awfully preoccupied, Robin. In fact, you were subvocalizing as I came down."

_I was? Swell. And he has super-hearing._ Tim forced himself to ask: "Could you make out many of the words?"

Superman had a look of amused sympathy as he said, "For your peace of mind, let's just assume that I couldn't. But whatever is weighing on your mind . . . I'm sure you won't deliberately do anything you know you _really shouldn't_. If you make an honest mistake in a tricky situation, that's all part of life. I hate to think how many _I've_ made, but I still manage to accomplish some good things occasionally!"

Hearing _Superman_ express confidence in your moral fiber was . . . different, somehow . . . from hearing Batman say he had faith in you. A moment to be treasured in either case, but . . . well, Tim would have to think about the subtleties later. Right now was a good time to say something polite . . . and hastily change the subject!

"Thank you for coming on such short notice," Tim said sincerely. "I heard you just recently got your powers back. You must be a very busy man now! If it's not too personal . . . how did that happen so suddenly after a _year_ on the sidelines?"

"You probably heard the power-loss began after an overdose of red solar radiation during that Crisis a year ago," Superman said patiently. "That sort of thing had been known to severely weaken me in the past—but I usually recovered faster once I made it back to an environment full of 'normal' yellow sunlight. A solid year as 'an ordinary man' was _surprising_. In hindsight, I'm now convinced that my body had been fully recharged for a long time _before_ I started to overcome a subconscious block which had been working as a throttle. But once that started to crack open, the powers came rushing back very fast!"

"Seems to be a lot of that going around," Tim said, enjoying the surprise on Superman's face. "Batman also shows signs of having a mental block in certain areas, and frankly, my first attempt to sneak around it has failed miserably! That's why I think unconventional methods are called for."

"Even if you are right, _my_ powers have precious little to do with diagnosing—much less curing—psychological problems!"

"No, but you must know practically everybody who _does_ have such powers and plenty of experience using them," Tim argued. "Raven quit the Titans to go do who-knows-what while I was on sabbatical, and I've never even met that telepathic 'Miss Martian' girl who briefly tried her luck with the group. I could probably find her, but do I really want a complete stranger to mess around in _Batman's_ head? Beyond that, I'm coming up short on ways to _directly_ contact the right kind of people and then get them to take me seriously—especially if I want to do it without Batman knowing! But every veteran hero must owe _you _a few favors!"

"I don't keep a scorecard of that sort of thing," Superman said simply. "But suppose you tell me exactly what you think is wrong, and then I'll think about who might be ready, willing, and able to help—if you're on the right track."

"Fair enough!" Tim took a deep breath. "Nightwing and I noticed the first symptoms right after that Crisis you mentioned . . ."

* * *

**Author's Note:** As some of you will have guessed by now, I just recently reread _Batgirl #45_. For any of you who haven't read it or don't remember the details, I'm going to fill in some background about what actually happened in that issue, along with explaining what I extrapolated from it for my own purposes. (Stop complaining! You have my permission to _skip_ the rest of this note if you really don't care!)

_Batgirl #45_ was the issue in which Cassandra suddenly decided to experiment with wearing one of Barbara's old Batgirl costumes when she went out on patrol. Then she bumped into Robin (Tim) fighting some berserk drug addicts. He made a few admiring comments about how that costume "really suited" her and she looked "very hot."

In the regular continuity, _nothing further_ ever came of that! In context, it was obvious that Tim _wasn't trying_ to charm her with compliments so he could then ask her out on a date or anything; he was just making a few spontaneous remarks after being _very surprised_ by how different she looked in that outfit. At the end of that scene they went their separate ways and apparently never mentioned the details of that encounter to each other (or anyone else?) again!

How Cassandra _felt_ about Tim's remarks was unclear—she didn't even _try_ to reply to them, and we didn't get any narrative captions describing what was happening inside her head. I've decided it's a _fair guess_ that she, with her limited language and social skills at the time, found she simply _didn't know_ what the "proper way" was to respond when a guy whom a girl just liked as a friend—but _didn't _think she was in love with or anything like that—suddenly started making such personal remarks about how "very hot" she looked. And I also believe it's a fair guess that Tim _later_ figured that out and decided he had been rude to make such remarks at all. But when Cassandra never mentioned it again in future encounters, and didn't seem to be holding any grudges, I'm guessing he just tried to push it out of his thoughts as an embarrassing slip of the tongue which was best forgotten. Rather than rake it all up again by explicitly apologizing for possibly offending or confusing her with his silly remarks, way back when?

At the end of _Batgirl #45_ Cassandra returned the old costume to Oracle and reverted to her usual look. Barbara made it clear that Cassandra was _welcome_ to keep the old costume for future use, but Cassandra just said "No" without explaining her reasons. One possible reason was that the old Batgirl costume had _high-heeled_ yellow boots which Cassandra definitely wasn't used to jumping around in, and one of those heels had broken off in the course of a typical night's activities. (Barbara said ruefully that the same thing used to happen to her.) So it's possible, for all I know, that Tim's comments had little or no effect on Cassandra's final decision about which costume she preferred! But he probably _never knew_ about the problem with the boots, so I choose to assume that, right or wrong, he still _blames_ himself for making his friend feel _extremely uncomfortable_ that night!


	4. Trouble in Tibet

**Author's Note: **We now skip ahead a bit. Robin and Superman, with help from others, have concocted a plan. Superman has recruited his cousin Kara to help out. As we open up, she's telling Batman some of the highlights of the plot of _Supergirl #14_, which I've been reading in the _Supergirl: Identity_ TPB. _Supergirl #14_ was the issue in which Kara Zor-El and Cassandra Cain came face-to-face for the first time in the DCU's regular continuity—but since Cassandra was still the leader of the League of Assassins in that story, working to fulfill a contract to _kill_ Kara, it obviously "never happened that way" in the world of my parody!

* * *

**Chapter Four: Trouble in Tibet**

"—so I got a tip that the League of Assassins wanted to kill me for reasons unknown. You weren't around when I swung by your cave to do a little research, but Robin was. He offered me a few tips. Number One was: _Don't mess with their new leader; she's dangerous!_ But I figured I could take care of myself, so I nagged him into giving me a lead on where the League's current Secret HQ was rumored to be."

"Tibet," Batman said without looking around from whatever he was doing with test tubes and chemicals at a workbench. "About thirty miles north-by-northwest of Nanda Parbat."

Well, at least that proved his ears were still turned on. Kara Zor-El had been standing here in the Batcave for three minutes now, working from the prepared script, and after giving her one glance as she flew in, the Dark Knight had shown precious little interest in anything she was saying about her recent (imaginary) adventure. Apparently whatever he was analyzing was far more important.

She resumed: "Yeah, that's what's _he_ said. So I flew over to the right area and starting scanning the terrain with my X-ray vision. There was this one humongous old temple that had lead shielding in the walls, so I figured it was the place. I burst right in through the front doors."

"Your cousin has never been big on subtlety either," Batman observed. "Read Sir Basil Liddell Hart's book _Strategy_ sometime. It emphasizes the folly of attacking the enemy along the _most predictable_ line of approach."

"Okay, okay, so it turned out they were _expecting_ me to do that! A big chamber inside was flooded with artificial red solar radiation and my powers started fading away by the second. There was also a life-sized dummy stuffed with diamond dust that I plowed into, and that made me start coughing. Then Batgirl came at me with a pair of swords flashing—I think they were wired up to something which kept extra-strong red solar energy running through the blades so they'd pierce my skin easily. Maybe she couldn't find any kryptonite on short notice?"

Batman paused as he was reaching for a pipette. "Batgirl?"

"Yeah. Never met her before, but she was wearing a pointy-eared costume with a bat outlined on the chest in yellow. I understand her real name is Cassandra Cain. Robin said she just recently took over the League of Assassins by blowing up the _previous_ leader?"

"These things happen," Batman muttered, visibly losing interest as he squeezed a few drops from the pipette into a test tube and squinted at the resulting reaction. "I'm sure she's just going through a phase. Give her time; she'll pull out of it. You're still alive, aren't you?"

Kara had seen and heard some strange things in the time since she first landed on Earth, but it was still a shock to hear anyone imply that pursuing a career of murder-for-hire might be a normal part of a teenage girl's struggle toward maturity, and really wasn't worth fussing about! And while she knew some men might feel that way, Batman was supposed to be much stricter about misbehavior by his own apprentices!

(Of course she had been _warned_ by Kal-El and Robin that something of the sort would probably happen when Batgirl's name entered the conversation, but some things you just had to hear with your own ears before you could believe them!)

"Alive, but not because she went _easy_ on me," Kara objected. "And it looked like touch-and-go for my good buddy Boomer. She had done terrible things to him, and then just left him chained up, bleeding, dangling from the ceiling, while she waited for me to show. He easily could have died if I'd been a few hours later in finding her! Heck, I didn't even know she had captured him until I saw him! Apparently she left a message on my answering machine and _assumed_ I'd pick it up soon!"

"Sounds like sloppy hostage-taking technique," Batman muttered. "The whole point of the exercise is to put pressure on other people, and you can't do that if they don't _know_ you've got the hostage in the first place!"

Kara wondered for a moment if the Dark Knight would finish by saying bitterly: _I taught her better than that!_ But he didn't. Having gotten a general criticism of sloppy methodology off his chest, he lapsed back into apathy on the subject of Cassandra Cain's recent peccadilloes, preferring to concentrate on the far more important task of heating the contents of another test tube over a Bunsen burner.

"Anyway," Kara said, bound and determined to follow instructions by not revealing that she noticed anything more peculiar than usual in Batman's attitude, "what saved my butt at the last minute, as that crazy ninja girl was about to cut my throat, was that all of a sudden some extra-long crystal spikes just sprang out of my body—mostly from my back, but with a crystal lump centered around the navel—and a couple of spikes impaled her before she could duck! She dropped her swords and collapsed behind me in a puddle of blood!"

Batman _didn't_ express any skepticism about such an unlikely _deus ex machina _allowing Kara to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He didn't even bother to ask if the impalement had _killed_ Batgirl, which was a considerably weirder omission! Instead, he favored Kara with his very best Intimidating Glare (pretty darn good, she had to admit), and demanded: "And _how_ did you gain _that_ ability?"

"Well," she said, doing her best to shamefacedly scuff the toe of one boot against the rocky floor of the cave, "Lately I've been having some freaky flashbacks of my father talking about how 'special' he had made me. I think maybe those spikes were a genetically engineered ace in the hole, a weapon even I didn't know about, meant to kill my cousin by now if I hadn't had the run-in with Diana's Lasso of Truth last year to help sort things out in my soul . . . but the knowledge that I was about to _die_ subconsciously triggered the spikes against a whole different target? Or something like that?"

Batman stared at her bare midriff for several seconds. Kara had observed before that he could scrutinize a nubile female body with _less trace_ of apparent sexual interest than any other heterosexual Earthman she had met who was over the age of puberty.

So when he finally said, "I don't see any sign of those crystalline extrusions now—not even scar tissue healing at a super-fast rate after they broke off?" she took that at face value as his motive, instead of accusing him of just seizing an excuse to ogle her, as she would have done with almost any other guy she knew if he stared at her torso so intently. (Granted, with some of those guys, she'd've known she was being _unfair_, but it still would've been fun to see if they _blushed_. Or least stammered for a moment! With Batman, she accepted that any such effort to shake his cool would be a lost cause.)

"They didn't break off," she corrected. "They just . . . disappeared . . . as fast as they'd arrived. Left my skin _unmarked_! I think the molecules were absorbed right back into my body after maybe ten, twenty seconds—but at any rate, they didn't just fall to the floor when I didn't need 'em any more."

_Wait for it . . ._

"Are you sure the 'crystal spikes' were _completely_ reabsorbed? Did you sweep the area for lingering particles with your X-ray and microscopic vision?" he demanded.

"I _couldn't_, even if I'd thought of it," she said, doing her best to project wide-eyed confusion. "All those red sun lamps, remember? Boomer looked horrible and I was pretty battered myself! All I could do was make an emergency call for another friend to fly over and get both of us out of there, pronto! Forensic evidence was the last thing on my mind!"

"Amateur attitude," he growled, but his tone wasn't any harsher than usual. She suspected he had leveled that same accusation at lesser mortals on hundreds of occasions and now it was automatic.

"Anyway, after the doctors and nurses had Boomer in a hospital bed with needles and things stuck in him, and said it would be many hours before they'd feel right about reducing the painkillers and other medication enough to let him wake up again, I had some time to kill. Decided _you_ might want to hear about all this."

"Yes. Good thinking. Those spikes of yours are a perturbing new development. In about ten minutes I'll be finished up with this bit of analysis, and then I can arrange to visit Tibet—fortunately, it's been slow in Gotham this week."

"Do you want me to tag along?" Kara asked innocently.

"No, there's no need to let the crime scene get further contaminated by your flitting about before I can gather up any remaining evidence. Don't slam the door on your way out," Batman added, in a marvelous display of his usual tactful manner when he had no further use for a visiting superhero.

"Roger that, big kahuna," she said deadpan, and vanished with a whoosh before she could ruin the whole plan by bursting out laughing.

A few seconds later she was a mile away from the Batcave. She activated a communications device. "Mission accomplished, Kal—he'll be on his way shortly."

"Any snags?"

"Just the _anticipated_ weirdness in his reactions. I said it was definitely the HQ of the League of Assassins, and he didn't care; I said Evil Batgirl tried to murder me in there, and he didn't care; I said she was last seen bleeding on the floor, but I didn't specify 'alive' or 'dead,' and he _still_ didn't care—but when he hears that _I_ manifested a mysterious new power in that place, strictly in self-defense, which _might_ have left traces littering the area, _then_ all of a sudden he wants to go sweep the place for clues? Well, whatever works!"

"Thanks. We'll take it from here."

Supergirl pushed a button to "hang up," and remembered how her last conversation with her cousin had ended.

* * *

_She had said to Kal-El: "Let me get this straight. You want me to lie to _Batman_, pretending I'm a ticking time bomb with bizarre genetically engineered defenses, in order to take advantage of his paranoid tendencies and lure him into an ambush . . . for his own good?" _

"_Yes."_

_"Okay!_ _But why_ _did you think I might have any _qualms _about the idea?"_

"_Er . . ."_

"_You do remember that ever since I _arrived_ on this planet, he's suspected me of being a monster and I've considered him an arrogant jerk, don't you? And then he and Diana ambushed_ both of us _in the park so they could drag me off to Themyscira no matter what you or I wanted?"_

"_I thought you might have gotten over that during the past year, when he was on vacation and tempers could cool."_

"_Not hardly! It's payback time! Anything that will take him down a peg is fine with me!"_

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

For anyone who didn't read _Supergirl #14_—well, you haven't been missing much, but I just want to assure you that I _didn't invent_ the idea that there's a Huge Loose End in the plot re: "Whatever happened to Evil Batgirl _right after_ she was impaled by Kara's bizarre crystal spikes and collapsed on the floor in a puddle of her own blood?"

A few seconds later, Supergirl's body looked normal again, and she somehow managed to call her friend Powerboy just as that issue ended—and then as the next issue opens up, it's much later—perhaps days later?—with Kara and Powerboy both standing in mid-air talking outside Bellevue Hospital in NYC, where Boomer has been unconscious in a hospital bed for awhile, slowly recuperating from whatever Evil Cassandra did to him. (We were never told the gory details of _exactly_ how badly he'd been injured.)

If Powerboy can fly as fast as I think, he should have arrived at the League's Secret HQ in Tibet within a few minutes after getting Supergirl's distress call. Was Evil Batgirl still stretched out on the floor, bleeding profusely, as he entered that chamber? Did Powerboy just leave her there, to live or die, because he was in a hurry to make Kara happy by carrying her and her friend Boomer out of Tibet as quickly as possible while Kara's body started regaining its strength from the yellow sunlight outside, and Kara didn't say a word about giving Cassandra any special attention? Did rank-and-file members of the League of Assassins come in later and start giving medical treatment to Cassandra before she could bleed to death? Did Supergirl or any other superheroes _even bother_ to make another visit to that Tibetan lair to see if Cassandra Cain and/or any of her subordinate assassins were still there, alive or dead?

To all those questions, I can only say: "Your guess is as good as mine!"

As far as I can tell, Joe Kelly (the scripter of those Supergirl issues) _never bothered_ to address any of those points in any way, shape, or form! Nor has anyone else at DC, to the best of my knowledge! Nor is it terribly clear just how Kara had _learned_ the League of Assassins was gunning for her scalp in the _first_ place. That last point is why I started out this chapter with her just saying to Batman, as vaguely as possible, that she "got a tip." (It's _possible_ that some supervillains whom Kara had fought in the previous issue of her title were actually working for the League of Assassins, but they never said so in any dialogue I saw!)


	5. Springing the Trap

**Author's Note:** Okay, one problem here is that until now, three chapters out of four were basically parodies of previously published material. Making fun of the ridiculous things DC actually did in its treatment of Cassandra Cain, Post-Infinite Crisis, provided enough inspiration to get me going. But now I'm drifting far away from anything that "actually happened" in the canonical source material which inspired this parody. I do still know what the "big revelation" will be regarding why Batman's head isn't screwed on straight where Cassandra is concerned, though.

* * *

**Chapter Five: Springing the Trap**

Two miles away from the front gates of the ancient temple, Batman—strapped into a non-powered glider made of stealth materials—touched down on in a deserted meadow. The Batplane would keep circling overhead for three hours unless he called it down sooner. If he didn't communicate with it after three hours, it would automatically start its way back toward an island base in the Indian Ocean while sending out a signal to the Batcave which Alfred would receive.

Batman could have landed closer to the objective, but he wanted some time to adjust to hiking in this thin Himalayan air before he had to engage in any rough stuff.

Nothing happened during his approach, except that the wind was picking up. No rain—you didn't get much precipitation in "the roof of the world"—but it was already dark and gale-force winds were likely to arrive soon. Batman wasn't worried about that; it was just a point to keep in mind.

Once he had a clear view of the portico at the front of the temple, Batman hunkered down and studied the area through binoculars for ten minutes before doing anything else. The shattered condition of what had been two very tall wooden doors jibed with Supergirl's description of how she had gone barging in, hard and fast, without bothering to knock.

No sign that anyone had made the slightest effort to repair those doors in the last few days. On the face of it, one might think any random passerby could waltz right in that way, confident that any fancy security precautions previously wired up to the doors must have been torn asunder by Kara Zor-El's bull-in-a-china-shop tactics.

But Batman hadn't lived this long by taking everything in a villain's lair at face value. Anything so obviously inviting had to be labeled "highly suspicious" until further notice.

He spent the next half hour circling the temple, seeking and considering alternate means of ingress, and finally settled on a large chimney at the back of the building. Nothing untoward happened during his slow descent to the temple's kitchen. Nor in the corridors which led him toward the great hall which accounted for the front half of the ancient structure. That was where Supergirl's fight with what's-her-name, the new leader of the League, had allegedly occurred.

Supergirl had described the area as flooded with red solar radiation from lights strung up all over the place. She hadn't been kidding—and no one had bothered to turn them off since she left. A couple of those lights had burned out in the last few days, but several more were still hard at work, giving a reddish tint to everything. This meant, at the very least, that a generator was still running, somewhere in or near this building. Which could suggest that some of the League of Assassins were still in residence. (Although it was possible that they simply hadn't bothered to switch things off on their way out.)

Batman was not overly concerned with that point. He had fought members of that League before, sometimes several at once, and they'd never yet managed to kill him. He seriously doubted their average quality had improved in the last year or two. If any stragglers were still in this temple, and were dumb enough to attack instead of scuttling in the other direction, he'd cope with that when the need arose.

Even without the lights he could have found the coagulated blood on the floor, if only by following his nose. The wind was definitely gusting outside, but only a bit of it was reaching through the open doorway into this area. Shouldn't be too much of a distraction.

The blood presumably belonged to what's-her-name, that crazy girl who'd taken over the League—so naturally Batman ignored it as a very low priority. Who cared?

There were also some particles glittering in the beam from his flashlight—probably residue of those bizarre crystal spikes Supergirl had extruded and reabsorbed in the heat of the moment. Batman pulled out an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from his utility belt. This was what he'd come for!

What's-her-name had killed some people and taken control of the League of Assassins and tried to kill Supergirl. She had extorted Robin into breaking a dangerous contract killer out of prison. She was one of the deadliest martial artists on the planet even at the best of times . . .

But Supergirl had so much weirdness surrounding her that it had been giving him the creeps ever since the night they met. Batman didn't appreciate that. When it came to creepy feelings, he had always believed that it was more blessed to give than to receive; so he was very generous about that form of giving!

Anyone who that effect on him was obviously far more dangerous than the insignificant little waif who thought she could run the League of Assassins. Sometimes you had to concentrate on the greater evil. In this case, it wasn't even a tough call.

He was still delicately maneuvering crystalline particles into the plastic bag when he became aware he wasn't alone.

The ambusher must have been wearing soft-soled footgear and been well-trained in stealth; he was _almost_ silent on the smooth stone floor as he approached Batman from the rear.

But _almost_ fell a long way short of _completely_ when the sharp-eared target had been trained by some of the finest _sensei_ in the world. Probably a full-sized male, currently about fifty feet to the rear and moving closer with a stealthy tread . . . Batman rolled to one side in case of incoming projectile weapons and came up several feet away with a batarang gripped in his left hand.

No gun; no shuriken; no sign of any proper projectile weapon at all. The approaching figure was that of a tall man, about the same height and build as Batman himself. Dressed in a loose costume, Medieval European in nature, with gloves and hood added to cover every square inch of skin. The hands grasped a lengthy piece of wood, hefted in a relaxed way which suggested true expertise.

Oddly enough, the weapon was a quarterstaff, European style, such as Robin Hood and Little John had used in their attempts to crack each other's skulls when they first met. Probably oak. Here in Tibet you'd normally expect a length of bamboo instead, but maybe this rogue was a recent import rather than local talent? The hood made it impossible to judge which part of the world this stick-fighter's ancestors had come from, but his dress and choice of weapon didn't resemble the League's usual style . . .

Knowing he'd been made, the man was striding faster now, his soft leather boots

Batman reflected. There were various ways to handle a trained man wielding a quarterstaff.

One approach was to quickly find a similar staff of your own and meet him on even terms. (Batman didn't see any other staves handy.)

One approach was to take him out from a distance before he could clobber you with that oversized stick. (Batman refused to carry firearms, and suspected a batarang or trank dart would be deflected by the staff. He might use the one in his hand to parry, though.)

One approach was to lure the man into crowded quarters where he lacked the elbow room to use the staff efficiently. (Possible, but unlikely in this instance.)

One approach was to just engage him directly, trusting in your superior martial prowess to keep you intact until you could take advantage of any small opening which presented itself. (Bingo!)

Fifteen feet away now . . . Batman kept waiting for the stick-fighter to say something. A self-introduction, a joke, an insult, whatever.

This fellow didn't bother with any of the usual preliminaries. Possibly figuring he'd do better to conserve his oxygen for the serious business at hand?

Batman was almost in the stick-fighter's engagement range now . . .

_So fast! _

Batman barely evaded the first blow. The stick-fighter might not be metahuman—too soon to say—but his moves were as swift as those of any "normal person" Batman had ever observed in combat; himself included.

They danced around the floor for a minute. The staff never touched Batman's body, but it did a crackerjack job of keeping him from moving close enough to grapple. The stick-fighter didn't make any obvious mistakes, such as overextending himself in a failed attack or getting tangled up in his own rapid footwork as he turned to keep Batman in sight. One solid hit from that staff might crack bones . . . and if that happened, the enemy could gain an overwhelming advantage.

Batman's first inclination was to drag this out as long as possible, gambling on the stick-fighter's stamina being less than his own. After all, the guy was waving around a heavy stick, which ought to put extra strain on the muscles of his upper body. Just let him start to slow down as his blood ran short on oxygen, and Batman would find new opportunities arising.

But there were potential drawbacks to that plan. The nameless stick-fighter's full resources were unknown; he might have superhuman capabilities which would make a plan of "wear him out" unworkable. More worrisome, he might have allies elsewhere in the temple whom Batman simply had not yet seen.

Facing this man alone was . . . challenging. Facing him _and_ a few other fighters of similar merit could become a truly miserable experience.

Batman decided to accelerate things. His right hand still held a batarang—he rolled away from a low sweeping attack and then his left hand shot for a smoke capsule in his utility belt. Nothing fancy; just creating a cloud to block the foe's eyesight for several seconds would improve the odds of clocking him a good one with hurled batarangs. If it didn't work, no loss; Batman could just try something else.

He raised his left hand, ready to throw the capsule—

--And it wasn't there any more. It hadn't burst from excessive pressure of thumb and forefinger; it had simply vanished from his grasp. And had the wind been particularly noisy at his back just now?

Batman threw the batarang anyway; near-certain it wouldn't strike home, but hoping to distract the stick-fighter for a couple of precious seconds which would give Batman a little time to do a visual sweep of the surrounding area.

That part worked—he heard the _thwack_ of hard wood striking metal and batting it away—but he didn't see anything helpful as his head twisted. Still the same vast, empty room; the red floodlights; the drying blood several yards away; precious little else to catch the eye. Certainly no other humanoid figures visible. Had the capsule been _teleported_ away, or—

The stick-fighter was rushing forward now, and Batman faded back and to the left. Still ought to be a good thirty feet behind him before the nearest wall could become a problem—

Batman's left boot moved back; he settled his weight onto that foot—and then it sunk into the still-solid-looking floor without meeting any resistance. He might still have recovered his balance and sprung away from the camouflaged pit—if not for the sudden shock delivered by what felt like two human hands colliding with the right side of his chest, pushing him back as he teetered on the brink—

He fell, reflexively rolling sideways so he was less likely to break his back if he slammed into a floor. (After you've already dealt with a broken back once, you feel even less inclined to go through the same thing all over again.) It was pitch black in here; whatever illusion or other weirdness he had just fallen through was still serving to block out all visible light from above.

He didn't go splat.

He fell several feet and then splashed.

Someone had drilled a shaft and then partially filled it with . . . . not water, but something thicker, smelling suspiciously like several tons of jello. Nice shock-absorption capabilities, anyway; he doubted he had even sprained anything.

Climbing back out of here was unlikely to succeed; but it was barely possible that this vertical shaft connected to some tunnel which might lead him out of here. Finding such an escape route would require wading or swimming through a mass of jello, though . . . Batman's right hand went for a rebreather in his belt—

—And didn't find it. The belt was still buckled around his waist, but several key items were no longer in it. They had been when he was facing the stick-fighter. Someone was playing games.

Then something hissing fell through the unseen "ceiling" above and Batman smelled a scent that was all too familiar.

Bebeck, formerly of the Red Trinity, now the very prosperous managing partner of Kapitalist Kourier Service, Inc., tossed in the third container of knockout gas and scooted back from that stretch of apparently-solid stone floor as it once again became solid in truth as well as in appearance (until further notice).

"I still think this plan over-elaborate," she observed. "Batman could _never_ match my speed; I could have subdued him alone if it had to be done."

"And how long has he been rubbing shoulders with the likes o' the Justice League, my pretty Russian lassie?" asked the man with the staff; the man who _currently_ called himself The Silent Shillelagh. "Who was to say he didn't have some frightful piece of alien tech handy, captured ages ago and squirreled away for a rainy day without even his nearest and dearest knowing aught of it; a tiny contrivance which might stop you in your tracks once he sussed out the manner of metahuman that was bedeviling him and gave the proper voice command or whatnot?"

Bebeck paused, struck more by his way of expressing himself than by the substance of his speech, the latter being a mere rehash of old arguments. The Irish lilt fell pleasantly on her ears, but the man seemed inconsistent in when he pronounced the word "of" and when he turned it into "o'." An hour ago the man had not sounded that way at all, and soon enough he wouldn't sound that way any more. Was it worth asking him to explain whatever rule he was using, while he would still know the answer to the question? Or would he just be offended?

She decided not to say anything which might be misinterpreted as mocking him for his accent. That wouldn't have been her motive in asking, but in the old Soviet Union there'd been a fair amount of prejudice in Moscow against those whose intonations showed they were not ethnically Russian, and she wasn't sure how sensitive the Irish might be about such things when speaking to those whose English was of a more American nature.

She stuck to the main point instead. "I remember the explanations for why we did it this way, and I played my part as agreed, yes? I merely wonder if we were overcautious. It wasn't nearly as hard as we feared." Bebeck had never even met Batman before; but she owed some favors to Flash (the redheaded one; not any of those others), so she'd agreed to help when he had come knocking on the door to request. She was even being paid for her time and trouble, but she didn't think the other people in the temple knew that, and saw nothing to gain by informing them.

The Silent Shillelagh grimaced, feeling dissatisfied by the nature of this clash, although not for the same reason as the raven-haired Bebeck. Sure and Batman was a brawny fighter, not one of those impatient boyos who attended a few classes in some Oriental fighting art and then thought they were cock-of-the-walk. Didn't seem proper for such a stout-hearted laddie to be defeated by unseen opponents playing a mean trick.

But remember now, the fellow was going daft upstairs. Curséd, belike. In such a spot you weren't trying to beat a man in a tourney at the county fair according to sportsmen's rules; you were just trying to subdue him as painlessly as possible for his own good so that he could be treated for what ailed him and restored to his kith in due time.

There was a flash off to his right, and the third member of their little band became plainly visible. A Japanese lady in a black-and-white outfit, hovering well above the floor. "Hero?" she said. "You may as well revert now."

Reluctantly, The Silent Shillelagh manipulated the H-dial at his belt . . . and became plain Hero Cruz again, a young African-American wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The quarterstaff had vanished to wherever all his costumes and equipment went after they weren't needed any more.

Hero reflected that it was a pity that even the skills he magically acquired from the dial didn't carry over to his "default self," no more than the authentic superpowers did. As The Silent Shillelagh, he'd somehow had the benefit of "memories" of thousands of hours of practice in fighting with large sticks; he'd been able to look at each of Batman's moves and feel trained reflex guiding him in how to counter it effectively. It would have been sweet to preserve that expertise for future use, but now he only remembered that he _used to_ remember how to use a staff masterfully.

Nobody had seriously expected Hero to beat Batman, but he'd given the Dark Knight a run for his money for a few minutes, and now he wondered how long the fight would have lasted if it had just been the two of them, man to man, with no fancy powers on either side.

Kimiyo Hoshi (the _good_ Doctor Light) was the main reason the conspirators had crafted a story about Supergirl which justified setting up all those red floodlights; her powers faded out fast in the absence of a decent light source, and it had been vital to have her maintain the "hard light" appearance of certain stretches of stone floor which were actually just covering deep pits where solid stone used to be. They'd known that sooner or later they'd get Batman maneuvered into position atop one or another of those pit-traps . . . then Kimiyo would just cause the appropriate stretch of hard-light-posing-as-stone to become as insubstantial as a rainbow, and the Dark Knight would fall right through.

Into jello, of course—nobody wanted him to fracture anything. (Okay, so there were millions of nasty people in the world who would _love_ to hear that he had fractured something—but they weren't part of this conspiracy, so their opinions didn't count.)

Now Hero had spent the last couple of minutes standing here feeling about as useful as an air conditioner inside an igloo. He asked: "Shouldn't we be fishing him out of the jello now that he's been gassed?"

Doctor Light shook her head. "Nightwing swears Batman can hold his breath for four minutes in a pinch. I figure on giving him at least six before I remove the lid and peek in." She glanced at a chronometer in her left hand. "Still a couple to go."

"But you could turn the hard-light 'floor' transparent so we could watch without letting him climb out, right?" Hero ventured.

Doctor Light glared at him. "I've always had a profound _respect_ for the Batman. When his longtime protégés tell me he is now mentally ill, probably due to some outside influence, I believe them—else I wouldn't be here in the first place, right? But I still don't relish the idea of us avidly watching a good man resist the gas for as long as humanly possible and probably a bit longer, before finally suffering the indignity of collapsing when he starts inhaling again. It would feel too much like the quaint old English custom of bear-baiting."

Hero, feeling unfairly maligned, glared right back in the face of her righteous indignation. "I don't think turning him into free entertainment was my motive, Doctor. I just meant we could more closely monitor the situation to make sure he doesn't _drown_ . . ."

Doctor Light winced. "All right, I believe you. I'm sorry I assumed the worst. Ambushing a former teammate has me on edge. But believe you me, Batman is far too resourceful to let himself pass out in a position that will have him promptly suffocating face-down in a pool of jello. He'll be fine."

And a minute later they verified that he was.

Doctor Light insisted upon watching the prisoner for a few more minutes before deciding he couldn't be faking. Then she asked Bebeck to go in and clap on the restraints. Hero could tell Bebeck was not wildly happy about the idea of getting bogged down in stuff that could sharply reduce her speed—but this had all been part of the original plan, and she didn't do anything worse than make a face before retrieving the high-tech manacles from where she'd hidden them ten miles away; then jumping down into the jello and doing the last part of her duty.

All the time she was down there, Hero had one hand on the dial at his belt, ready to transform if Batman did anything; and Doctor Light had turned herself invisible again—but nothing happened.

After Doctor Light had used a light-construct to help Bebeck carry Batman up out of the pit, the jello-covered woman said politely, "Excuse me a moment," and vanished from the temple in the blink of an eye. About twenty seconds later she was back, looking much cleaner. Either she'd found a way to let friction peel off all the jello from her slick, impermeable costume, or else she'd changed clothes in a hurry. She also appeared to have rinsed her hair—as she reappeared there were blurs around her head which Hero decided were her hands moving so fast as to simulate the effect of a hair dryer.

"Well," Bebeck said, "we did it. Now we load him into his own Batplane and let others take over, yes?"

* * *

For once, it was a group of good guys who had tackled one of the most perplexing puzzles in the world of costumed adventurers: _How do you capture Batman?_

Naturally that trick had been tried by villains hundreds of times before, and some of those attempts had actually "succeeded" . . . kind of . . . in the short run . . . but a fat lot of good that had done any of the perpetrators in the _long_ run.

Of course the newest bunch of plotters to attack the problem had at least one critical advantage over most of their predecessors in the same endeavor: The heroes in question were _sane, _and they liked to think they were reasonably intelligent, to boot!

Villains who were both sane and intelligent usually _didn't_ go anywhere near Gotham City in the first place, much less try to lure Batman into an elaborate trap. It was the schizophrenics and megalomaniacs and super-powered _dimwits_ who were prone to think a head-on collision with Batman might be both entertaining and cost-effective! Most of the so-called masterminds who thought that way now spent most of their time wearing prison uniforms or occupying padded rooms in Arkham, except for the handful who had managed to get themselves killed as their "brilliant" schemes unraveled around them.

So the first lesson the plotters had learned from the historical record was: _Don't challenge Batman on his home turf. _

Hence the setup for an abandoned temple in Tibet, nowhere near Gotham, nor anything else resembling a modern city.

The second lesson the plotters had learned was: _Don't expect to beat Batman at his own game._

Many had tried to defeat Batman at hand-to-hand combat or some other form of close combat, such as swordplay—the operative word being "tried." But it would scarcely surprise him if yet another optimistic young hotshot took a crack at it—so they'd decided Hero Cruz would spin his dial until he came up with something appropriate for such a confrontation; a costumed role which Batman couldn't possibly identify at a glance (since the dial never repeated itself!).

The third lesson the plotters had learned was: _Don't let him see you coming with the real attack. Heck, don't even let him recognize you!_

If he already knew who you were, he probably had a response ready in his utility belt. If he didn't know, he might figure out your strengths and weaknesses with unbelievable speed, and adapt his tactics to match. (Hero Cruz's stint as "The Silent Shillelagh" had been a mere diversion, rather than the real attack.)

Thus the recruitment of Wally West's old friend Bebeck, a speedster who had never worked alongside Batman. She had been instructed to hold off as long as possible before using her powers at all; so as to give Batman very little time to deduce and react to her involvement.

The fourth lesson the plotters had learned was: _Don't talk too much._

Plenty of villains had temporarily gained the upper hand and then squandered their advantage by letting themselves be baited into exchanging lots of probing questions and dramatic answers with Batman, or worse yet just droning on and on about their motives, their methods, their unhappy childhoods, and so forth—any of which might provide Batman with a fresh clue on how to cope with his current predicament, or at least allow him extra time to seek another solution.

The fifth lesson the plotters had learned was: _Don't just copy any plan which has been used on Batman before._

You had to assume that even if it had caught him unprepared the first time around, he'd have later reviewed every step of it and prepared some clever trick or gadget which he would whip out on demand if someone tried a rerun.

As far as anyone knew, this precise combination of stunts and metahuman resources had never been tried in the past.

Nightwing had said frankly that he would have preferred to have Boston Brand simply take over Batman's body and then self-administer a powerful sedative, but unfortunately insubstantial phantoms rarely carry cellphones to give you 24/7 access to their ears. Just waiting for a chance encounter with the guy was probably not going to work soon enough to be worth the trouble.

Robin had added that it would probably be best if he and Nightwing didn't try to devise the entire plan for the ambush, because so much of their grasp of tactics had been derived from Batman's tutelage. They might subconsciously recreate something Batman had previously told them about; something he would know how to beat this time!

* * *

**Author's Note:** I know, I know. This one wasn't nearly so funny as the first couple of chapters, and it didn't advance the Tim/Cassandra romance, either. This has something to do with why it took me so long to finish this up and post it. My feelings of inadequacy regarding how this chapter was developing were a major roadblock. But the whole point of Chapter Four had been to set things up to lure Batman into a trap for his own good, and I decided I couldn't very well just skip over the actual trap by saying, in one or two paragraphs, that he walked into an ambush and got kayoed. My readers would get a feeling of disappointing anticlimax. (Trying to avoid the "anticlimax" problem was also why I rejected an earlier plan of having Boston Brand, Deadman, take over Batman's body and move him to wherever the conspirators wanted him to go. That would be entirely too easy.)

On the brighter side: Shortly after I started this project, I wrote out a rough draft of a lengthy conversation between Tim and Cassandra; one in which they finally start to get on the same page regarding such details as just how she feels about Tim. I wasn't sure when I'd have things to the point where it would make sense to insert that conversation into this story—but I'm thinking I might accelerate the process and have it about two chapters from now. The conversation is long enough to be the bulk of a chapter all by itself.

Hero Cruz really exists in the DCU, but his role of "The Silent Shillelagh" was invented by yours truly. For anyone who didn't die, that's the whole point of the "Dial 'H' for Hero" concept—if you have one of the appropriate dials, you take on a brand new (and very temporary) costumed heroic identity each time you use it. You can't control what costume and powers you get, and you can't repeat a previous role. The other conspirators recruited Hero because they knew that whatever role he used would be completely strange and new to Batman.


	6. Just a Walk in the Park

**Chapter Six: Just a Walk in the Park**

Last time Tim had said he wanted to meet her in a public place in broad daylight the next time around, instead of his continuously traipsing in and out of her apartment at odd hours. Poor tradecraft, he'd said. Likely to raise suspicions if someone started paying attention.

Cassandra felt he was seriously overrating the neighbors on her floor if he thought them likely to even remember, much less care, whom they might've glimpsed going in or out of someone else's apartment. Not unless the entry had been followed by the sound of gunfire or something equally disturbing. But if it made Tim feel better, she was perfectly willing to try a change of scene.

They had agreed over the phone to meet and hike around in Robinson Park. They would speak softly, and change the subject if they passed anyone going the other way. All the trees surrounding them should reduce the risk of being lip-read as they went along.

Cassandra was only mildly disappointed by this plan. She'd been thinking of wearing a miniskirt for the next meeting with Tim. Most guys enjoyed seeing her legs and there was no reason to think he'd be an exception. But he'd also think she showed poor judgment if she dressed that way for anything billed as "hiking"—even in the controlled environment of a city park.

High heels were out for the same reason. (Not much of a loss—she didn't like the silly things, but she had _learned_ to maneuver in them when necessary, and Tim might have liked the way they affected her posture.)

Reluctantly, she settled for her "basic black" look—jeans, sweater, and sneakers.

They met at a gate on the west side of the park at 8:30 Saturday morning and strolled in. Once they were on an otherwise deserted stretch of trail, Tim started bringing her up to speed. Basically, the trap in Tibet had worked out perfectly, and Batman was now heavily sedated and in restraints in a secure location. Two reliable telepaths—both old friends of Bruce's—had been recruited to work in tandem on this one, and ought to be arriving at the secure base and starting the necessary exploration of his thought processes any minute now.

So far nobody had worked up the nerve to tell Alfred Pennyworth the truth about what was going on. Alfred took his professional ethics as a butler very seriously; asking him to collaborate in ambushing his own employer might have created a horrible conflict of interest. The current hope was that the telepaths could straighten out whatever was wrong pretty darn quick, before Alfred had time to get more worried than usual about Bruce being gone for a couple of days. Then Bruce himself could (hopefully) return to the Manor and assure Alfred that everything was going fine.

"I don't think you've ever met the telepaths Barbara recruited for this one," Tim said. "Faith and Looker. Both women. Both have been Batman's trusted teammates at different times; one in the Outsiders and one in the JLA. Both already know his identity, so we're not adding any extra security risks by bringing them in. We wanted two of them, to compare notes on anything tricky they found in there, and also to keep each other honest, just in case. Looker surprised me by saying she already did something similar for Bruce, years ago, when hid mind had been traumatized by the original Clayface and he needed help finding his way back to what he calls 'normalcy.' That was even before I met him—I guess he just never bothered mentioning it."

Cassandra added, "And after Bruce is free, he's less likely to deck a woman for invading his mental privacy than a man?"

"Well, we're hoping it won't come to that. Once the damage has been repaired, we hope he'll recognize it was all for the best, and that the ladies handled his mind as delicately as anyone could have managed under the circumstances. If he needs to deck anyone, he can go after whoever planted this weird apathy about you in his head in the first place!"

Cassandra didn't say a word.

After a long moment, Tim added defensively, "Okay, okay! I grant it may take a little time for him to really see our point of view on this. I can assure you that Looker and Faith have both promised not to gratuitously manipulate his natural emotions in order to make him forgive and forget, though."

She looked at him sharply. "You're holding something back—'manipulate emotions,' you said, and you're not as sure as you sound that it _won't_ happen."

"Well . . . this wasn't why we picked her, but one side effect of Faith's powers is that people always want to trust her. She swears it's beyond her control; it just leaks out to affect anyone who spends much time in her presence."

"So Bruce will be more likely to forgive her if she's the one who explains what they did and why?"

"Maybe. Of course he knows all about her powers; he knew before he ever recommended her for the League—"

Tim broke off as Cassandra touched his shoulder and said, "Jogger."

She watched him listening. Now that he wasn't talking, it only took a few seconds for his own ears to start tuning in to the same rhythmic footfalls coming from way up ahead, beyond a bend in the trail.

A silver-haired woman in a purple sweatsuit came jogging up the trail.

Cassandra estimated the lady was almost seventy years old, but most people would have said mid-fifties. The woman obviously believed in watching her diet and keeping fit. The trail wasn't wide enough for three people, so Cassandra seized the excuse to entwine her left arm with Tim's right one and tug him away from the trail into the ankle-deep leaves, leaving the firmer footing clear for the jogger.

The old lady beamed at them appreciatively as she trotted past, and Cassandra glanced at Tim in time to see him realize that the jogger was romantically assuming they were not two young people who just happened to be walking together . . . but a _couple._

Then it occurred to him that anyone else they met in here would probably think the same, especially if their arms stayed looped together. Reflexively he began to try to tug his loose after the lady had passed and couldn't see them anymore . . . then stopped after a mere split second as it also occurred to him that Cassandra's feelings might be hurt if he seemed to be in a _desperate hurry_ to get away from such harmless casual contact.

At the moment Tim seemed to be forgetting that she could _see_ exactly what he was about to do, or hesitating to do. (Of course she was making it easier for him to fool himself by only monitoring him out of the corner of her left eye, fostering the impression that she was more interested in watching her footing as she tugged him back onto the trail and "forgot" to release his arm after they were moving forward again.)

Finally Tim decided the politest course was to keep quiet, as if he'd scarcely noticed anything different about the way they were walking now. Cassandra knew he would simply let her arm stay where it was until such time as _she_ saw fit to pull loose. (This meant he was in for a _long_ wait, but he didn't know that.)

"Clear to talk?" he asked as they commenced strolling down the trail, his question showing he knew her senses were more acute than his.

"Sure," she said comfortably, and let him carry the conversational ball again for awhile. He chose to explain how turbulent Batman's relations with several fellow veterans of the old JLA were at the moment. Cassandra had not heard much about it at the time, but over a year ago there had been some embarrassing disclosures about how Zatanna and some other heroes had once erased several minutes of Batman's recent memories in order to cover up what he had caught them doing to Doctor Light (the bad user of that name).

When this came out, it rocked things terribly—and had a lot to do with why there hadn't really been any JLA for the next year while Batman was away on a long vacation and Superman was lacking his powers and Wonder Woman had just dropped out of sight. A bunch of the old-timers were just starting to pull it back together now, and after a year's vacation, Batman's grudge seemed to have faded . . . but not entirely vanished . . . and nobody wanted to provoke it into flaring up again.

The result was that Zatanna (and various other veterans of the Justice League, including some who had _not_ been involved in the Doctor Light mess) now flatly _refused_ to take an active part in any scheme which involved deceiving, ambushing, imprisoning, and/or invading the mental privacy of Batman. The ones who had done it all before didn't want to renew the burden of guilt and then have Batman find out—as he eventually would—that they had done it again. The ones who were innocent on that score wanted to keep the moral high ground and be able to say, "By golly, _my_ teammates must know they can trust me to watch their backs instead of planting a knife in them. Even if they don't retain that much faith in certain _other_ superheroes I could name . . ."

Anyway, Tim went on and on about the politics of it. Cassandra was interested, although she wasn't planning to apply for membership in the JLA any time soon—if ever. Anyway, it would be a very neat trick for any teammate who saw her every week to keep such a guilty secret from her for any great length of time . . . at the very least, she'd know the person was frantically trying to keep _something_ secret . . . so she wasn't too worried about it.

More importantly, Tim was distracted enough by telling her all these things that he wasn't so worried anymore about the fact that she still had her arm linked with his.

"Jogger," she said suddenly, and Tim shut up again.

This one was something different. Male, no more than thirty, chiseled features, sleek black hair, wearing Lycra shorts and a tank top, and obviously very proud of his tan and his well-defined six-pack. He gave Cassandra a frankly admiring look as he approached, and if she hadn't been with Tim she thought the stranger would have tried to strike up an acquaintance. Instead he just grinned and kept going down the trail without a word.

Cassandra smiled back at him, just to be polite, and—unexpectedly—felt Tim's arm stiffen a bit. A few glances his way confirmed that he'd felt a twinge of jealousy—vague, not too serious, and quickly gone—followed by several seconds of mulling something over. She couldn't sort it out right away—hyperalertness to people's body language was not the same thing as telepathy—but it was worrying him, and it had something to do with her.

Then she flinched as the message finally came through, loud and clear, when Tim twisted his head to peer back over his shoulder at the guy who had passed them. It had _just_ occurred to Tim that Cassandra might very well have acquired some sort of boyfriend within the past year, while Bruce and Tim and Dick were off globe-trotting. Some nice normal civilian type whom she kept in a separate compartment of her life and hadn't mentioned to anyone in the caped community.

But if she knew Tim—and she really thought she did—while he might brood about it now that the idea had occurred to him, he wasn't going to pester her with lots of nosy questions about anything in her civilian social life which she hadn't mentioned first. He'd just tell himself stoically that if for some reason she wanted him to know all about her romantic entanglements, then she'd tell him. If that didn't happen, then he should respect her privacy.

Heck, he probably wouldn't even try to wheedle any answers out of Oracle about Cassandra's personal life, because he'd know that someone as smart as Babs would see right through him in a heartbeat if he "just casually" raised the subject the next time they spoke.

All of which could have been fine and dandy _if_ Cassandra already had a sweetheart stashed somewhere, and _if_ she'd wanted to avoid the embarrassment of explaining that to Tim if he asked her out on a date and she had to turn him down . . . but since that wasn't even remotely true, his decision to not press the point was downright awkward.

Fleetingly it occurred to her that she could always try to prime the pump by calling Oracle and _insisting_ Babs find a way to "let slip" the information that Cassandra definitely _hadn't_ acquired any boyfriends lately . . . without letting on that there was any special reason Tim might be interested in knowing that tidbit . . .

No, no, no. Too complicated. Trying to recruit a mutual friend—Babs or anyone else—to carry deniable messages from Cassandra to Tim, and possibly back the other way, was likely to get incredibly silly. For one thing, Tim might not believe that Babs, down in Metropolis now, knew _everything_ that was going on in Cassandra's life here in Gotham. For another, Babs probably wouldn't even cooperate on this one.

She could hear it now: _Cassandra, I thought you and Tim were still on good speaking terms. If there's something important he needs to hear, why not eliminate the middlewoman and just tell him yourself? I don't want to take the blame if I pass along a message about something emotionally loaded and then he _doesn't_ react quite the way you wanted!_

No, the subtle approach just wasn't working. It was time to get a few things straight with Mister Drake.

"Tim, have you got any unbreakable commitments in the next couple of hours?"

"No," he said immediately. "Actually, I need to find ways to kill time so I don't have to lie to Alfred if I go back to the Manor too soon. Why?"

"There are some other things we need to talk about, and this isn't the right place. I want to be _sure_ we won't be interrupted by civilians every five or ten minutes. If you don't want to go back to the Manor, and don't want to be seen at my apartment too often, then come up with something else!"

Tim gave her an odd look, but when she didn't elaborate on the need for prolonged privacy, he didn't probe. Instead he started chewing on the problem in his logical way.

"Wayne Tower," he said after a minute's thought. "I can walk right into Bruce's office without the guards stopping me. His secretary won't be in on a Saturday, and of course he isn't there either. It's got all the anti-surveillance measures that money can buy."

She squinted at the angle of the sun for a moment and checked her mental map. Wayne Tower was only a few blocks away from a gate near the southwest corner of the Park. From where they were standing now, the most direct route to that gate would involve abandoning the trail and cutting across the Park . . . thataway.

She moved briskly in that direction, hauling Tim along via their still-linked arms. Rather than resist, he adjusted quickly and stretched his legs to keep up with her pace.

After two minutes of plowing through the underbrush, Tim said deadpan: "Cassie, it's not very ladylike for a girl to drag a guy off into the trees this way without warning."

"You really think I care?"

"No," he admitted, "but somehow I felt obligated to _mention_ it . . . just for the record."

* * *

**Author's Note:** The next chapter should be out _soon—_because I already wrote the lion's share of it _months ago_, right after I wrote the material which became the first and second chapters of this story. It's the scene where Tim and Cassandra really start to clear things up regarding the nature of their feelings for each other, and the roots of his reluctance to simply ask her out on a date, and so forth. After that, I expect we'll switch back to the "parody" portion of our program as two telepathic intruders start trying to sort out why Bruce has been demonstrating such a strange combination of _apathy_ and _amnesia_ where Cassandra Cain is concerned . . .


	7. Let's Talk About Feelings

**Author's Note:** Dialogue in this chapter will refer to certain events of the "Fresh Blood" story arc which ran through _Robin #132_,_ Batgirl #58_,_ Robin #133_, and _Batgirl #59_, in that order, immediately after the big "War Games" crossover event which had consumed three months' worth of various Batman-related titles in 2004. For the purposes of this story, I assume "Fresh Blood" happened _exactly_ the way it was depicted in the comics—unlike the Post-Infinite Crisis stuff that I've been cheerfully mocking in this serial. If you haven't read "Fresh Blood," prepare for spoilers.

By the way: I'm working on the theory that Cassandra Cain thinks of herself as "Cassandra," but Tim usually thinks of her as "Cassie" for some reason. At any rate, that's what Tim called her in the OYL stories by Beechen that "inspired" this story, so I took that as a baseline.

* * *

**Chapter Seven: Let's Talk About Feelings**

All the way to the Tower, Tim had been imagining things Cassie might want to hash out with him in absolute privacy.

_Tim, I'm in love with somebody else, but I will always think of you as a brother. _

_Tim, you're just not my type, but I know a really neat girl you ought to meet_.

_Tim, I think I'm pregnant. I need some help dealing with it._

He'd already been through all _that_ with Stephanie Brown a couple of years ago, courtesy of some jerk who'd seduced her and then dumped her, but with _his_ luck it wouldn't be so surprising to have it happen all over again with another female friend. Good old Tim Drake, always there with a shoulder for a girl to cry on . . .

_Tim, I don't think I can really respect a guy I can beat up ten times out of ten, even with one hand tied behind my back._

No, he didn't think that was it. He'd probably had it right the first time: She wanted to give him the "you're just like a brother to me" speech. He was tough; he could handle it.

As luck would have it, as Tim and Cassie approached an elevator in the lobby of the Tower, a uniformed security guard had just stepped in. Seeing them coming, he held the door open until they had joined him. Tim saw the guard had already punched for the fifth floor, where the main security center was. Tim waved his own security card at a scanner next to the controls and then punched the button for the top floor.

Tim didn't recognize this guard—probably hired within the past year—but the man obviously knew _his_ face, or else he would have been asking just why two teenagers were heading to the top on a day when nearly everybody was home for the weekend. Instead, the man evidently preferred not to rock the boat by pestering someone with unlimited access about his reasons for utilizing it just now.

In fact, if the guard even _thought_ there was anything the least bit peculiar about one of Bruce Wayne's adopted sons and a very attractive Asian girl—neither of whom had regular jobs here—apparently wanting to spend time in the big man's office suite on a Saturday morning, then he was doing a _superb_ job of keeping his doubts discreetly hidden. It occurred to Tim that what was concealed from him might not be concealed from Cassie, but he wasn't about to ask her for a rundown; it wouldn't be fair to the poor man.

If Cassie ever ran short of money, though, she could always clean up in a poker tournament. The only way anyone would ever bluff her with a busted flush would be if she chose to let him get away with it just so he'd think it was _possible_ to fool her occasionally . . .

The guard got off on the fifth floor, saying politely, "Have a nice day," and that was all the conversation they'd had with him.

They ought to be alone anywhere on the top floor today, but they'd go into Bruce's private office to make sure. You couldn't even get an elevator to carry you that far up on weekends unless you were one of the few with the right security card to wave at the scanner. Then you needed to use it again to get out of the enclosed reception area facing the elevator doors—a sort of airlock. Then you had to know the passcode to punch in at the entrance of Bruce's office. All along the way, you also had to assume that someone in the security center was glancing at the live feed from overhead cameras and would smell a rat if he didn't recognize your face as belonging to someone authorized to access this area at any time of day or night.

In due course Tim and Cassie were inside an "office" which had more square feet of open space than many Gothamites' home apartments. No security cameras in here, and the place was swept for bugs five times a week. Anyone attempting old-fashioned eavesdropping from outside a closed door or window would hear an awful lot of nothing. Cassie let down the blinds while Tim turned on the lights, then they divided the area and did quick sweeps to ensure no intruder was lurking inside a closet or behind a couch or anywhere else.

Finally satisfied, they came face to face in front of the big desk which Bruce occasionally sat behind. Tim braced himself for the worst as he asked, "Okay, what's on your mind?"

She looked him in the eyes and said without preamble, "Tim . . . I really like you. _A lot._ Not just as a guy who's a good friend for any girl to have. And I can tell that you like me too, and not just in the sense that you think I look cute."

He blinked several times as that sank in. Once again, he had proved he was still terrible at figuring out what was worrying a girl. "_That's_ why we're here?"

"Yes," she said promptly. "And to set the record straight: I don't have a boyfriend, no matter how you define boyfriend, and I don't think you've gone looking for a new girlfriend since you got back from that world tour." She paused a moment to study him, then said cheerfully, "No, you _don't_ have one! So what's stopping you from asking me out to a movie or something?"

He wasn't used to hearing a girl be so direct about that sort of thing, but Cassandra Cain had always favored attacking a problem head-on if it had to be handled at all. This was a conversation Tim wasn't ready to have, but he doubted that would have changed if she had waited another six months, or even a year, so they might as well get it over with.

Hey, the worst he could do was put his foot in his mouth, hurt her tender feelings, ruin a beautiful friendship, and feel like a complete schmuck. (Not to mention having the security guard look at a monitor and wonder why that girl was crying her eyes out as she left the building in a hurry. What would that do for Tim's reputation around Wayne Tower?)

_Gee, it's a good thing there isn't too much pressure . . . _

"Cassie . . . you're a nicer person than I once gave you credit for, and there's certainly nothing wrong with your looks . . . but after all, I don't ask every cute girl I meet out on a date."

She stared at him. "_Try again._"

Yes, he should have known he couldn't fool her into thinking his feelings for her were no stronger than those he had for any other girl he'd ever met socially and found reasonably likeable.

"Well, one reason I haven't asked you out since I came back to Gotham was that I can't _see_ people the way you do. I appreciated that you seemed fond of me as a friend, but I was afraid of making a complete fool of myself if I assumed you felt anything more, and then you had to tell me you just plain _didn't_."

"And now?"

He bit the bullet and started to express something he'd been keeping tamped down in his soul for a long time. "I think I'm _ashamed_ to ask you out on a date."

The flash of shocked confusion in her face suggested his body language wasn't terribly clear at this point. She asked: "Ashamed? Of me?"

"What? No, of me!" Tim paused to exercise some self-control; he needed to stay reasonably calm to explain himself properly. (It didn't help that Cassie had looked so _unhappy_ when he said "ashamed" that he had felt an instinctive desire to hug her in the same way he might comfort a crying child.)

"Cassie . . . once upon a time in Bludhaven, when the Penguin had us captured and surrounded and incredibly outnumbered, we stalled for time by putting on a show for him. Gladiators in mortal combat for Caesar's amusement, with an army of thugs making side bets? I still can't believe he was dumb enough to think that untying both of us for that spectacle—especially you—was a controllable risk."

Cassandra Cain remembered that night as well as Tim did, of course. Her raised eyebrows suggested she was waiting for him to get to the point.

"Our one-on-one ended when you fell down and then, at Penguin's insistence, I shot you to 'prove' you were already dead, thus making him and his henchmen relax a little when they saw your 'corpse' didn't even flinch—"

Visibly, she was _still_ waiting for him to get to the point. She wasn't going to make this easy for him—he'd have to spell it all out.

"We've never talked about it again since right after it happened, so I don't think you realize how ashamed of myself I feel nowadays whenever I think back to that night. Friends are _not_ supposed to shoot each other. Heck, I wouldn't blame you if you had never wanted to team up with me again!"

It was encouraging to see the _horrified_ expression on her face at that last suggestion. Now she finally started to say something, but he cut her off with an upraised palm. "Let me finish this, Cassie, please—if I don't clear the air now, I don't know when I'll work up the nerve to try again. I've only fired a real bullet into a person's flesh once in my life, and you're that person. I feel _rotten_ about it, and I really like to think I'm not the kind of guy who goes around physically abusing girls and _then_ expecting them to just forgive and forget and still agree to date him in the future. Sadism/masochism? Battered-wife syndrome? Whatever you want to call it, it's not the kind of relationship that fits my self-image."

The latest expression on her face had precious little in common with the psych profile of a battered wife. _Portrait of a Woman Frustrated by a Little Boy's Boneheaded Mistakes_ might come closer to describing this picture . . .

"Tim," she said impatiently, "I was wearing kevlar. Even at such close range, I knew it would slow the bullet enough to _barely_ let it penetrate flesh. You were aiming where you wouldn't hit a bone or artery or anything important. I didn't have to hold still and wait for you to pull that trigger if I didn't _agree_ it was a good way to confuse Penguin and lure him in close to check my 'corpse'—so that we could finally gain an advantage."

Tim scowled. "Well, of course I wasn't trying to maim you, but what's that got to do with anything? It's the principle of the thing! I should know better than to shoot people! Besides, even if it didn't permanently impair your arm, it still left a scar, didn't it?"

Cassie was wearing a black turtleneck. She suddenly started pulling it up over her head. Tim automatically looked away, then finally glanced back long enough to reassure himself that she was still decent, with a T-shirt beneath the sweater. After depositing the turtleneck on Bruce's desk, Cassie reached over with her left hand and tugged at the hem of the shirt's right sleeve to bring it up over her shoulder so the entire arm was exposed. She glanced, very pointedly, at where the old bullet mark . . . _should_ have been . . . and then looked back at Tim and waited for his reaction.

He was staring at the smooth, unmarked flesh. No scar? Not even a small patch with a slight difference in coloration? He frantically searched his memory. It had been her upper _right_ arm, yes? Not the left one?

Now she was smiling at him. "After I got dunked in a Lazarus Pit, a lot of scar tissue just . . . went away. I think it was days later before I really noticed how much of my skin was smooth and new! Even when I had that mark, I _never_ worried about it, and now there wouldn't be anything to worry about even if I wanted to!"

"I know, I know. Cain shot you several times in your formative years, teaching you to ignore the pain. You learned to just take _all_ your scars for granted. But believe me, I've worried about _that_ scar enough for both of us!"

Cassie blinked. "So you feel . . . like it's an unpaid debt? You shot me, I bled and then it formed a scar, you got away unpunished, and the guilt is still hanging over your head?"

"Uh . . . kind of."

She gave him a considering look. "If I shot you in the arm to give you a scar just like the one I _don't even have_ any more, would that make you feel better? Balanced scales?"

"Um," Tim said with his usual savoir faire. _(Why, oh why, didn't I see that one coming?) _

"I think I could if I just had to," she said helpfully. "I really, really, really don't want to hurt you, but if you absolutely insisted this was the only way we could ever go on a date, I'd grit my teeth and say, 'Well, whatever it takes to make you _happy_, Tim.'"

He was struck by the absurdity of that scenario. _Young lady, you must give me a flesh wound before I'll ask you out for dinner and a movie. _Sure, what could possibly be more romantic?

"I don't think that's what I was saying. I never really went in for flagellation. I wasn't talking about a few formalities to quickly clear out of the way _before_ we went on a date. I was talking about why I'd feel _guilty_ about asking you on a date at all! Like I was taking advantage of you . . ." His voice trailed off in the face of her scornful look.

"Guilty. Taking advantage. Even though I was _never_ angry at you in the first place? And even though if we do go on a date, we both know I could tie you in a knot if you suddenly went crazy and _really_ tried to hurt me?"

"Well . . . yeah. Pretty much!"

"That's . . . " She paused. "A word. Full of ego?"

"Egotistical?"

"That's it. That's what you're being. It doesn't matter that I knew what you were going to do with that gun and I _let you_ do it . . . it doesn't matter that the point was to save _both_ our lives after we'd already been captured . . . it doesn't matter that you dug the bullet out later and stitched me up with no permanent harm done . . . it doesn't matter that there's no scar now and I'd practically _forgotten_ that stupid little wound until you brought it up . . . it doesn't matter that I'm willing to give you a matching wound if it will 'balance the books' inside your head . . . it doesn't matter that you know perfectly well I'm _not_ easy to scare and I wouldn't go on a date with some jerk just because he hurt me once and had me good and intimidated from then on . . . all that matters to you is that _you_ still feel bad about that gunshot after all this time, and even though _I'm_ the 'victim' who got shot, you figure _your_ feelings about one bad night a long time ago are infinitely more important than _my_ feelings about the gunshot or about _you_!"

"Um," said Tim, noticing again that his gift for repartee was really in fine form today. After a moment, he added, "I think that's the longest single speech I've ever heard you make."

Her glare was _withering_, so he added hastily, "Which doesn't mean I'm trying to ignore the substance of it. Honest! I was listening to every word, and I'm willing to think about it _carefully_. But it will take time. I didn't have a constructive response springing to the tip of my tongue, so I reflexively stalled for time with a flippant remark."

"How much time do you need?" Cassie asked dangerously.

"I don't know; these things don't come with a built-in timetable! Definitely more than a minute or two. But if I just stand here with you glaring at me the whole time, it's going to take a lot longer to reach any conclusions. Do you have any idea how distracting you can be?"

Her mouth twitched and she seemed to relax just a smidgen. "Some idea. But not distracting enough, I guess, or you'd stop obsessing about the time with the gun."

* * *

**Author's Note:** As I've said before, I wrote nearly all of this conversation a long time ago, and then just let it sit on my hard drive until the plot caught up with it. Now I'll have to work hard to write the next chapter practically from scratch. And at some point I'll have to switch gears and show the mental exploration of the inside of Batman's head, which is bound to be a strange sight . . .


End file.
